Article
I will return to my silences: An overview of T. Carmi’s poetry
May 17, 2011
My right grates the scratch;
You were betrothed to me with a wound and a dream,
Without mercy, without loving grace.
The speaker is unable to sustain his love. His dream is spoiled by his wound. The woman addressed also represents the poet’s muse. The poetic act is simultaneously an embrace and a scratching of a wound. (Mum, in Hebrew, denotes a blemish or defect.) The dream is impaired by the artist’s awareness that the translation of the dream into words always falls short of the thing in itself.
Carmi’s poetry is replete with allusions to biblical, rabbinical and kabbalistic themes and texts. His frequent manipulation of the tension between the sacred subtext underlying his secular texts affords him opportunities for ironic interplay. In a poem bearing the superscription of a quotation by Robert Graves: “‘The muse is the perpetual other woman,”’ he writes:
Hatsarah (the enemy, the trouble, the second wife), the other . . .
The beloved, the traitor, the bosom of mystery
Who covers my voice (inspiration)
With a goat’s pelt.
The harlot, the peddler, my possession.
Who waves the scarlet thread
In her window
(from ‘To . . .’, Collected Poems)
Michal, King David’s wife, had covered her terafim (house gods) with a goat’s pelt, placing them in David’s bed to deceive Saul as to his whereabouts (I Samuel, 19:13–17). The pelt alludes, perhaps, to the kid’s skin with which Rebecca covered Jacob’s arms so that they may seem as hairy as Esau’s – and thus deceive Isaac, leading him to bless Jacob instead of Esau, – or perhaps to the whore’s price of a goat’s skin that Judah gave to Tamar (Genesis, 38:12–27). The scarlet thread is the sign with which Rachel, the harlot, marked her residence so that the Israelites attacking at Jericho might spare her life (Joshua, 2:18–20). All these are ruses used by temptresses to silence the real voice of the artist.
Carmi believed that modern Hebrew poets must relate to what Eliot had called “the tradition”. “I live within a specific tradition”, he argued, “I am permitted, even obliged, to utilise it. I wish that the relationship between what is written today in poetry be like the relationship between Bartok and Beethoven.”
A second characteristic of his poetry is recourse to the concrete – a technique he learned from the British and American imagists and from several Hebrew poets (e.g. David Vogel and Leah Goldberg). At times he can be ironically whimsical:
You are slippery [the original Hebrew reads: My slippery one]
You slide through my fingers
Like a cake of soap
Into the drain [eddy] of the tub.
I grope and fumble in vain.
Only after the many waters run out,
I find you at the bottom,
Pure and shining,
White [or a shining moon] in the white sky.
(from ‘Into Another Land’)
The white, shimmering, evasive cake of soap reminds the lover, taking a shower in a distant city, of his evasive, white-rounded love. His groping after the soap recalls her mystery, her charm, and physical beauty. The “many waters” refer both to her elusiveness and to the sea that separates the two.
Another aspect of his ars poetica appears in ‘First I Will Sing’:
First I will sing [say poetry]. Then, I might speak.
Repeating words I have already said
Like a person studying his features at dawn,
I shall return to my silences
Just like the moon decreases,
I shall publicly brandish the bird of weeping
Like a child drawing his sword on Purim,
I will return to [woo] your closed hands . . .
And I will sing. First I will sing. Wrap my words
In paper bags like pomegranates.
And then, perhaps we will speak
(from Selected Poems 1951–1969)
The pomegranate is the symbol of the poetic word – red and bursting with juice and seed – it must be wrapped in paper bags against the buffeting of the weather. Art is a rich but a delicate and vulnerable private matter. The poet may partially “brandish his sword of weeping” – his hidden “wound”, but only “like a child drawing his sword on Purim”. Purim is the time of masquerading, and the child’s sword is made of cardboard.
On occasion, Carmi dealt with social and political themes, but always shunned placard verse. His second volume, There Are No Black Flowers (1953), is a dramatic poem in several voices and reflects his painful encounter with children who survived the Holocaust. It telescopes the tragedy of the Shoah into a series of dramatic monologues. The agony of the speakers, their sense of loss mixed with feelings of guilt, are projected against the background of the indifference of society (embodied in the polite officialese of French bureaucrats who order that the home be evacuated so that it can be replaced by an atomic plant). A Far Eastern bamboo tree looms as a recurrent image of alienation and hopelessness. The poem closes in an optimistic note. René hears wind blowing music through the bamboo shoots and sees “how suddenly the almond tree runs along the [director’s] window in the perfumed snow and bursts into her room, its amazing abundance invading her heart with its white buds – there are no black flowers”(from Selected Poems 1951–1969).
His last two volumes of verse, Poems of the Azuvah (1988) and Truth and Consequence (1993), are deeply pessimistic. Haazuvah is a double-entendre with two meanings in Hebrew: (1) forsaken, desolation and (2) forsaken one (f) (i.e. the abandoned wife). Poems of the Azuvah has two central themes: first, the devastation felt by the speaker as he grows older, is plagued with disease and suffers the loss of friends; secondly, the theme of his latest divorce, the abandonment of his wife and home. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Dan Pagis.
In Truth and Consequence, Carmi returns to the problem of authentic art. In ‘The Whole Truth’ the speaker contends: “I’m the liar/ and search for the truth” and concludes: “But if you tell me/ that I am a liar/ I would be quite insulted”. ‘To Him Who is Far and Near’ was published after Carmi learned that he was dying of cancer:
In the distance C
The train’s whistle is heard
Like the wail of a baby;
The note on the wall dangles
Like burnt-out hyssop:
The crab’s line in the damp sand
Looks like a secret code
Of a submarine secret agent.
The view is from a hospital bed. The note on the wall is the diagnostic chart, conjuring up an association with the petitionary notes inserted in the Western Wall pleading for heavenly mercy. The cancer (the crab) works as an undercover agent leaving its traces on the sand.
Close by
The malignant growth
(radius 2.7)
Looks like a malignant growth.
Shalom, I say
Shalom to Him who is near and far
Shalom means peace and is used as greeting and farewell. The patient is aware of his possible death/ departure, but perhaps still hopes for peace or healing? Carmi died in 1994. Excerpted from Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century.
Carmi was a prolific poet and translator, one of the few poets born in the United States who wrote in Hebrew. His first volume Mum vehalom (Wound and Dream; 1951) has all the characteristics of the work of a young poet. Carmi included only four of its poems in his Collected Poems 1952–1994. He retained ‘Wound and Dream’, which serves as a foretaste of his views on the ars poetica:
My left hand is under your headMy right grates the scratch;
You were betrothed to me with a wound and a dream,
Without mercy, without loving grace.
The speaker is unable to sustain his love. His dream is spoiled by his wound. The woman addressed also represents the poet’s muse. The poetic act is simultaneously an embrace and a scratching of a wound. (Mum, in Hebrew, denotes a blemish or defect.) The dream is impaired by the artist’s awareness that the translation of the dream into words always falls short of the thing in itself.
Carmi’s poetry is replete with allusions to biblical, rabbinical and kabbalistic themes and texts. His frequent manipulation of the tension between the sacred subtext underlying his secular texts affords him opportunities for ironic interplay. In a poem bearing the superscription of a quotation by Robert Graves: “‘The muse is the perpetual other woman,”’ he writes:
Hatsarah (the enemy, the trouble, the second wife), the other . . .
The beloved, the traitor, the bosom of mystery
Who covers my voice (inspiration)
With a goat’s pelt.
The harlot, the peddler, my possession.
Who waves the scarlet thread
In her window
(from ‘To . . .’, Collected Poems)
Michal, King David’s wife, had covered her terafim (house gods) with a goat’s pelt, placing them in David’s bed to deceive Saul as to his whereabouts (I Samuel, 19:13–17). The pelt alludes, perhaps, to the kid’s skin with which Rebecca covered Jacob’s arms so that they may seem as hairy as Esau’s – and thus deceive Isaac, leading him to bless Jacob instead of Esau, – or perhaps to the whore’s price of a goat’s skin that Judah gave to Tamar (Genesis, 38:12–27). The scarlet thread is the sign with which Rachel, the harlot, marked her residence so that the Israelites attacking at Jericho might spare her life (Joshua, 2:18–20). All these are ruses used by temptresses to silence the real voice of the artist.
Carmi believed that modern Hebrew poets must relate to what Eliot had called “the tradition”. “I live within a specific tradition”, he argued, “I am permitted, even obliged, to utilise it. I wish that the relationship between what is written today in poetry be like the relationship between Bartok and Beethoven.”
A second characteristic of his poetry is recourse to the concrete – a technique he learned from the British and American imagists and from several Hebrew poets (e.g. David Vogel and Leah Goldberg). At times he can be ironically whimsical:
You are slippery [the original Hebrew reads: My slippery one]
You slide through my fingers
Like a cake of soap
Into the drain [eddy] of the tub.
I grope and fumble in vain.
Only after the many waters run out,
I find you at the bottom,
Pure and shining,
White [or a shining moon] in the white sky.
(from ‘Into Another Land’)
The white, shimmering, evasive cake of soap reminds the lover, taking a shower in a distant city, of his evasive, white-rounded love. His groping after the soap recalls her mystery, her charm, and physical beauty. The “many waters” refer both to her elusiveness and to the sea that separates the two.
Another aspect of his ars poetica appears in ‘First I Will Sing’:
First I will sing [say poetry]. Then, I might speak.
Repeating words I have already said
Like a person studying his features at dawn,
I shall return to my silences
Just like the moon decreases,
I shall publicly brandish the bird of weeping
Like a child drawing his sword on Purim,
I will return to [woo] your closed hands . . .
And I will sing. First I will sing. Wrap my words
In paper bags like pomegranates.
And then, perhaps we will speak
(from Selected Poems 1951–1969)
The pomegranate is the symbol of the poetic word – red and bursting with juice and seed – it must be wrapped in paper bags against the buffeting of the weather. Art is a rich but a delicate and vulnerable private matter. The poet may partially “brandish his sword of weeping” – his hidden “wound”, but only “like a child drawing his sword on Purim”. Purim is the time of masquerading, and the child’s sword is made of cardboard.
On occasion, Carmi dealt with social and political themes, but always shunned placard verse. His second volume, There Are No Black Flowers (1953), is a dramatic poem in several voices and reflects his painful encounter with children who survived the Holocaust. It telescopes the tragedy of the Shoah into a series of dramatic monologues. The agony of the speakers, their sense of loss mixed with feelings of guilt, are projected against the background of the indifference of society (embodied in the polite officialese of French bureaucrats who order that the home be evacuated so that it can be replaced by an atomic plant). A Far Eastern bamboo tree looms as a recurrent image of alienation and hopelessness. The poem closes in an optimistic note. René hears wind blowing music through the bamboo shoots and sees “how suddenly the almond tree runs along the [director’s] window in the perfumed snow and bursts into her room, its amazing abundance invading her heart with its white buds – there are no black flowers”(from Selected Poems 1951–1969).
His last two volumes of verse, Poems of the Azuvah (1988) and Truth and Consequence (1993), are deeply pessimistic. Haazuvah is a double-entendre with two meanings in Hebrew: (1) forsaken, desolation and (2) forsaken one (f) (i.e. the abandoned wife). Poems of the Azuvah has two central themes: first, the devastation felt by the speaker as he grows older, is plagued with disease and suffers the loss of friends; secondly, the theme of his latest divorce, the abandonment of his wife and home. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Dan Pagis.
In Truth and Consequence, Carmi returns to the problem of authentic art. In ‘The Whole Truth’ the speaker contends: “I’m the liar/ and search for the truth” and concludes: “But if you tell me/ that I am a liar/ I would be quite insulted”. ‘To Him Who is Far and Near’ was published after Carmi learned that he was dying of cancer:
In the distance C
The train’s whistle is heard
Like the wail of a baby;
The note on the wall dangles
Like burnt-out hyssop:
The crab’s line in the damp sand
Looks like a secret code
Of a submarine secret agent.
The view is from a hospital bed. The note on the wall is the diagnostic chart, conjuring up an association with the petitionary notes inserted in the Western Wall pleading for heavenly mercy. The cancer (the crab) works as an undercover agent leaving its traces on the sand.
Close by
The malignant growth
(radius 2.7)
Looks like a malignant growth.
Shalom, I say
Shalom to Him who is near and far
Shalom means peace and is used as greeting and farewell. The patient is aware of his possible death/ departure, but perhaps still hopes for peace or healing? Carmi died in 1994. Excerpted from Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century.
© Ezra Spicehandler
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère