Article
Translator Grace Schulman on T. Carmi’s poetry
Talmud, and Eros too, in a divided world
May 17, 2011
I search
for what I have not lost.
For you of course.
I would stop
if I knew how.
I would stand
at the Stone of Losses
and proclaim,
shouting:
Forgive me.
I’ve troubled you for nothing,
all the identifying marks I gave you
(a white forehead,
a three-syllable name,
a neck and a scar,
color and height)
were never mine.
The poem refers to a real stone of losses (even hato’im) in Jerusalem, a kind of “lost-and-found” connected with the return of lost property during the Second Temple period, as mentioned in the Talmud. The language is reminiscent of Pascal’s Pensées (“Console toi; tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne m’avais pas trouvé”), and, incidentally, of a Talmudic passage about an old man searching for his youth. At the same time, the language is characterised by a bareness of utterance and a kind of hysterical calm that is in keeping with the central situation of the poem: that of a lost modern man searching for wholeness in the other. He exclaims:
I swear by my life,
by this stone in the heart of Jerusalem,
I won’t do it again.
I take it all back.
Be kind to me;
I didn’t mean to mock you,
I know there are people here
– wretched, ill-fated –
who have lost their worlds
in moments of truth.
The speaker vows to stop the quest, and at the climax of the poem (“moments of truth”), has an astonishing insight about the loss of illusion. Still, he is compelled to continue; his search for completeness is circular and never ending:
And I search
for what I have not lost,
for that – that
name, neck, scar,
and forehead white as stone.
The passion for the search, and, by extension, the very passion for language, recalls the evolution of the Spanish word querer, comes from the Latin quaerere (“to search”, “to inquire”), but which came to mean “to desire”, “to love”. Querer means a passionate, amorous quest, the search at the center of the title poem – and of the poetry of T. Carmi.
One of the most striking characteristics of his poetry is the unexpected transposition of sacred images and religious ideas into erotic experience. In the sequence, ‘I Say Love’, for example, the opening lines are:
You untie the vows
within me.
You erase my handwriting
from the old drafts.
They are, of course, a portrayal of a modern love scene, and are spoken by a man to his woman. At the same time, they are a transmutation of the Kol Nidre prayer for the eve of the Day of Atonement (“Let our personal vows, pledges, and oaths, be considered neither pledges nor oaths . . .”)
[ . . . ]
Carmi’s knowledge of the sacred, and of Hebrew literature and legend, affords images that are used as agents of transmutation, enabling him to focus on a divided world and see the wonder in daily life. Even in his poems of historical awareness, he is concerned with people not as nameless victims (as in some of the poems of Cavafy and Milosz), not as ennobled human beings, but as ordinary men and women turning slightly away from the tragedy of public events. In ‘Model Lesson’, a teacher is cynically aware of the tragic implications of the lecture he is teaching about Biafra, even as he rebounds from the tragedy; in ‘Diary Entry’, an urban resident goes about his daily chores – a copy center, a tailor, an accountant – just as the guns are firing in Lebanon; in his ambitious poem, ‘Author’s Apology’, a soldier sitting in a room below ground level experiences the outside world only “through the eyes of men going up or down” as though they were angels on a Jacob’s Ladder.
[ . . . ]
Seeing a world that is divided by time and the notions of being and becoming, Carmi focuses his gaze on ordinary things in the struggle to redeem a broken universe: his agents of transmutation are, variously, “white fire on a black sky”, or “a fire that roars/ without wood or ashes”. His hallucinatory clarity calls back the surrealists, as do many of his images of flaming visionary change, despite their origin in midrashic sources. However, while the surrealists unified a divided world, often using fiery images of transformations to illuminate contradictions and make them whole, Carmi’s opposites are never reconciled. His poetry is a quest for a day that is alive, that does not end in death. Excerpted from the translator's introduction to At the Stone of Losses, New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1983.
With Carmi’s knowledge of Hebrew poetry, there was, in fact, no need to go to English literature for medieval and Renaissance forms: the sonnet, for example, was written in Hebrew at least two centuries before it was used in English; terza rima and ottava rima were rhyme schemes common to Renaissance Hebrew writing. As for surrealist imagery, the poems of Yannai, for example, of the sixth century, predict the igneous, clarifying vision of twentieth-century surrealist poetry.
Throughout Carmi’s poetry, there is a startling fusion of tradition and modern speech. For example, ‘At the stone of losses’ begins:I search
for what I have not lost.
For you of course.
I would stop
if I knew how.
I would stand
at the Stone of Losses
and proclaim,
shouting:
Forgive me.
I’ve troubled you for nothing,
all the identifying marks I gave you
(a white forehead,
a three-syllable name,
a neck and a scar,
color and height)
were never mine.
The poem refers to a real stone of losses (even hato’im) in Jerusalem, a kind of “lost-and-found” connected with the return of lost property during the Second Temple period, as mentioned in the Talmud. The language is reminiscent of Pascal’s Pensées (“Console toi; tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne m’avais pas trouvé”), and, incidentally, of a Talmudic passage about an old man searching for his youth. At the same time, the language is characterised by a bareness of utterance and a kind of hysterical calm that is in keeping with the central situation of the poem: that of a lost modern man searching for wholeness in the other. He exclaims:
I swear by my life,
by this stone in the heart of Jerusalem,
I won’t do it again.
I take it all back.
Be kind to me;
I didn’t mean to mock you,
I know there are people here
– wretched, ill-fated –
who have lost their worlds
in moments of truth.
The speaker vows to stop the quest, and at the climax of the poem (“moments of truth”), has an astonishing insight about the loss of illusion. Still, he is compelled to continue; his search for completeness is circular and never ending:
And I search
for what I have not lost,
for that – that
name, neck, scar,
and forehead white as stone.
The passion for the search, and, by extension, the very passion for language, recalls the evolution of the Spanish word querer, comes from the Latin quaerere (“to search”, “to inquire”), but which came to mean “to desire”, “to love”. Querer means a passionate, amorous quest, the search at the center of the title poem – and of the poetry of T. Carmi.
One of the most striking characteristics of his poetry is the unexpected transposition of sacred images and religious ideas into erotic experience. In the sequence, ‘I Say Love’, for example, the opening lines are:
You untie the vows
within me.
You erase my handwriting
from the old drafts.
They are, of course, a portrayal of a modern love scene, and are spoken by a man to his woman. At the same time, they are a transmutation of the Kol Nidre prayer for the eve of the Day of Atonement (“Let our personal vows, pledges, and oaths, be considered neither pledges nor oaths . . .”)
[ . . . ]
Carmi’s knowledge of the sacred, and of Hebrew literature and legend, affords images that are used as agents of transmutation, enabling him to focus on a divided world and see the wonder in daily life. Even in his poems of historical awareness, he is concerned with people not as nameless victims (as in some of the poems of Cavafy and Milosz), not as ennobled human beings, but as ordinary men and women turning slightly away from the tragedy of public events. In ‘Model Lesson’, a teacher is cynically aware of the tragic implications of the lecture he is teaching about Biafra, even as he rebounds from the tragedy; in ‘Diary Entry’, an urban resident goes about his daily chores – a copy center, a tailor, an accountant – just as the guns are firing in Lebanon; in his ambitious poem, ‘Author’s Apology’, a soldier sitting in a room below ground level experiences the outside world only “through the eyes of men going up or down” as though they were angels on a Jacob’s Ladder.
[ . . . ]
Seeing a world that is divided by time and the notions of being and becoming, Carmi focuses his gaze on ordinary things in the struggle to redeem a broken universe: his agents of transmutation are, variously, “white fire on a black sky”, or “a fire that roars/ without wood or ashes”. His hallucinatory clarity calls back the surrealists, as do many of his images of flaming visionary change, despite their origin in midrashic sources. However, while the surrealists unified a divided world, often using fiery images of transformations to illuminate contradictions and make them whole, Carmi’s opposites are never reconciled. His poetry is a quest for a day that is alive, that does not end in death. Excerpted from the translator's introduction to At the Stone of Losses, New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1983.
© Grace Schulman
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