I fell in love with Rachel

January 18, 2006 This lacuna in the education of a Hebrew poetry critic is a strange one, but it’s a fact: I’ve only just now become acquainted with the complete works of Rachel, thanks to Ilana Zuckerman, an editor of poetry broadcasts at the Israeli national radio station, who invited me to participate in a program on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth, and therefore compelled me, essentially for the first time in my life, to read all Rachel’s poems. I discovered a wonderful poet. Of course, I’d read a few of her poems here and there, and who hasn’t heard the songs made out of them, but I only now read them thoroughly from beginning to end, (all told, a small number of poems and all of them short), in light of the radio program. It seems to me that the fact that I’d allowed myself to skip most of her work is a symptom of the spirit pervading critics here, an approach which underestimates her poetry. One of them, Moshe Dor, who is usually not a stupid person, seriously claimed in an article published in the newspaper Ma'ariv that he is basically on her side, but that there are poets who are better sevenfold (or seventy-seven fold).

It may be worthwhile to begin the comparison of Rachel to the “sevenfold poets” with a simple assertion. Unlike the notables of the new Hebrew poetry – none other than Bialik and Tchernikovsky – whose poetry is filled with large chunks of literary plaster and pretentious verbiage, Rachel’s poetry is completely, but completely, without exception, the poetry of an unspoiled soul, without a smattering of the literary about it. All her poems – few in number and short in size, as has been mentioned – are marked with the stamp of unadulterated truth. The affected and pretentious structures of the literati (so harmful to poets who wanted to step out of themselves, to become someone else) never stuck to Rachel. Her poetry is entirely a matter of the soul, where a literary pose is unthinkable. To say about her that her spiritual world is shallow or limited, would be like saying that the soul is a limited thing (or that psychology is an inferior branch of philosophy). Interesting: while Rachel is accused of a superfluous preoccupation with her ‘I’ (“I have only known how to tell of myself”), {id="3174" title="Nathan Alterman"} has been blamed for total inattention to his. {id="3173" title="Natan Zach"}, it may be remembered, bothered to count and discovered that the word ‘I’ appears only four times in [Alterman’s] Stars Outside, in contrast with seventeen times in a smaller book [by Alterman’s contemporary] Abraham Chalfi.) But both accusations are incorrect. A poet must not be judged by standards external to the poems, but rather by the poems themselves. Both Alterman and Rachel are wonderful, each one in his or her own way: Alterman, even though he was not occupied with self, and Rachel, even though she was.

In contrast to her image as popular and limited in scope (which stems, to a large extent, from her apparently revelatory lines: “I have only known how to tell of myself/ My world is like the ant’s”), Rachel was a true intellectual. First of all, she was a highly professional poet; when it comes to rhyme and meter, there is no such thing as an un-intellectual poet (and it’s doubtful whether such a phenomenon exists in conversational poetry as well). Among other reasons this is because rhyme requires a sort of constant intellectual control, where mental judgment is operative no less than feeling.

Rachel’s professionalism as a poet is notable in her translations too. Whoever reads, for example, her translation of Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Poem of a Last Meeting’ and compares it with others, will see at once that hers is clearer, more musical and affecting. This is a matter of poetic professionalism, a purely intellectual matter. Moreover, Rachel absorbed, within her unalienated experience, each spiritual structure or intellectual model; out of feelings of transcendent affinity, she internalized classic intellectual figures such as Job or {id="3114" title="Honi the Circle-Maker"} [a legendary rabbi who fell asleep for 40 years; when he awoke, he suffered because no one recognized or understood him]:

My Bible is open to Job
– Great man: teach us also
to accept the bad the way we accept the good
blessing the God who beats us.

It seems that the depth of her identification with biblical characters is an excellent model for a completely internalized reading of the Bible.

Elsewhere, she reads about Honi the Circle-Maker, and shrinks back at the insult inflicted on him:

The sad fate of Honi
darkens my soul today:
"Someone met him on his way
and did not greet him at all."

Here, the wider world (Job, Honi) passes through the prism of Rachel’s soul. This is the nature of the challenge contained in the line, “My world is like the ant’s”. Your world is wider, isn’t it? You don’t get affronted the way I do (or like Honi) or fall in love or experience any other human emotion. And yet there is nothing more profound than these things: nothing more profound than love or an affront.

Rachel’s suffering is wonderful to me, because it is modest. When [poet] Uri Zvi Greenberg suffered, he described himself as practically oozing with the blood of the messiah. Bialik spoke about the “hammer of my great woes” (and in effect both Rachel and Bialik are talking about the same personal problems, “great” in the case of Bialik while for Rachel, modest as cyclamen, these aren’t large problems in and of themselves, but problems which are too big for her, bigger than she is).

If we examine Rachel by human standards, (and this is one of the most essential if not the most essential way to examine poetry), it is impossible not to be impressed by several aspects of her poetry: first of all, great courage, the courage to confess and expose. In the last poem of her collection it is possible to hear the slaughtering sword of self-cruelty beyond the cutting words:

I told all of myself to the end.
In my heart of hearts
I led strangers and pointed:
here –
beaten pride, here – unfulfilled expectations,
the peace after despair
forever after.

Here, one by one, she dismantles all defenses: the defense of pride, of expectation. My pride is defeated, she tells a stranger (who is the reader), my expectations disappointed. There is no arrogant cover-up, no mask of success.

In her poems, Rachel reports, for example, on her relationship with a married man, on her illness, her poverty. This ability to tell of herself “to the end” in modest words, to pleasure us with her sorrow, is the focus of her greatness.

A characteristic line runs across her suffering and it is wonderful: a lack of bitterness, an absence of dependence, of complaint; it seems to me that the absence of bitterness stems from something very good, very happy, that happened to her in her youth. This is what she says in ‘Kinneret’:

Even if I am left alone and walk bowed
And my heart becomes a beacon for strangers –
How can I betray you, how can I forget
the devotion of youth.

Everything hinges on this youthful grace. Whoever was once very happy, and knew how to tell herself that she was happy at that time, will never really become embittered. The truly embittered are those who were never completely happy. They were always a little angry, complaining, unsatisfied. The memory of happiness, connected to the poet's proximity to the Kinneret [the Sea of Galilee], is the source of Rachel’s continuing strength, the meaning of the poem ‘Perhaps These Things Never Were’. The poem is one of happiness, written out of great distress. “Kinneret, my Kinneret, oh my Kinneret/ did you exist or did I dream?” means that her distress is so suffocating, her misery so great, that it is hard to believe that there was ever any happiness here. Nonetheless, this poem too is built upon the same experience of distant joy.

Whoever says that Rachel is shallow is saying that the greatest desire, the one for happiness, is superficial.

Rachel, by the way, like {id="3182" title="Yona Wallach"}, died at the age of 41. Translated for PIW from Menachem Benn’sPoetry Portfolio. Tel Aviv: Yaron Golan Publishers, 1994, 89-92