Black is the color

September 06, 2012 During an episode of the Israeli version of American Idol, I heard the wonderful Anna Eckhard singing ‘On Autumn Nights’, a David Vogel poem from the collection Before the Dark Gate, set to music by Shem Tov Levy:
 
On autumn nights
an invisible leaf falls in the forests
lies silent on the ground.
 
In rivers
a fish will jump out of the water
and the echo of a wet knock
answer in darkness.
 
In the black distance
the galloping of invisible horses is sown,
fades away.
 
All these
the tired traveler will hear
and a shiver pass through his flesh.  [Tr. Lisa Katz]
 
 
The dominant color of the poem is black. Nothing is visible. Only extremely careful attention reveals isolated details in enormous abundance, details which cannot really be visualized (only a single fish leaps in the many streams?), before they disappear back into the darkness. What is left – that is, the poem, that which writes the poem, what remains in the face of all this nothingness – is merely a single shiver passing through the wanderer’s body.
 
And what can we say about this poem?
 
Empty black coffins for multitudes
will be waiting on the ground.
 
Beside them the old,
legs missing,
will stand, halved,
and stretch out
long, thin arms.
 
Cautious people
remain hidden in houses
and live deep within them.
 
At night
a long thin finger
approaches the window
and taps stealthily.  [Tr. Lisa Katz]

 
In a way, the second poem is the oppopsite of the first. In ‘On Autumn Nights’, the person is outdoors. Here, he waits, hidden, for his end. Nevertheless, there is something similar at work in both poems. Among all the plurals – coffins, old people, houses – a lone finger approaches the window. One might ask if this finger approaches a single window or if this is a finger, part of something larger than itself, approaching all the many windows. Vogel’s poems are dizzyingly full of these multiples, at the margins of which sometimes, suddenly, curtailment lies in wait. The naked dead hang silent, faced by the blind guard and so on. At times this verges on the brink of depression but at times there is a comforting beauty. At the center there is always a metonymy, a part substituted for the whole. This metonymy aspires to the absent whole [. . .]
           
The publication of this beautiful facsimile book is further evidence of Vogel’s triumph. Following the collections edited by Dan Pagis and Aharon Komem, one can simply read this book, just as it first appeared in Vienna in 1923. The same fonts. The same Roman numerals heading each poem. No introduction. No commentary.
 
Vogel’s triumph lies not only in that he is closer to poets writing in Hebrew [than to European poets], but also, ironically enough, in the triumph of his European landscape. When you read books of poems by contemporary young poets, you could be forgiven for thinking that we all share a landscape of forests and rivers. But therein lies a rupture and Vogel refused to align himself with the cause of that rupture. Surely, the metaphors of poet Abraham Shlonsky (the polar opposite of his contemporary Vogel, perhaps even Vogel’s bête noir) [sought] to create a new, non-European landscape in Hebrew poetry whose beginnings were in Europe. Think of Shlonsky’s Mount Gilboa poems, or even Alterman’s descriptions of Tel Aviv as a city whose markets are “an ode to metalworkers”. Are not these metaphorical endeavors, however lyrical, a pioneering attempt to build a new country in language, in poetry?
 
Vogel wanted none of this. He wanted a home, but did not find one, wandered from place to place, loved very many [. . .] The triumph of Vogel and his successors in modern Hebrew poetry is by no means the indulgent triumph of native Israeli Hebrew poets nostalgic for a non-State, because they already have one.  
 
Vogel’s triumph lies in the long shelf life of his poems. No other poet writing in Hebrew ninety years ago is read so avidly by readers, who need no mediating commentary.