Translator’s Introduction to J’Accuse

January 18, 2006 That uprising began on September 28, 2000, when Ariel Sharon – at the time head of the opposition Likud party – visited the Old City of Jerusalem’s Muslim sanctuary known as al-Haram ash-sharif, site of the Dome of the Rock, the al-Aqsa Mosque, and, beneath them, the ruins of the Jewish Temple. Sharon was accompanied on his tour by a large contingent of politicians and armed policemen. Violent riots broke out in the compound after Friday prayers the following day; the Israeli authorities used excessive force to quell them, and four Palestinians were killed, some two hundred injured. The mass unrest that had been predicted for several years, in the wake of the deteriorating situation in Palestinian communities and profound disappointment with the implementation of the Oslo Accords, swept across the occupied territories.

Some twenty-two months later, as I write this, the death toll in what has become known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada stands at more than fourteen hundred Palestinians and nearly six hundred Israelis. Israel has declared itself to be at war, and large parts of the West Bank and Gaza have been re-occupied or are now under long-term siege. The much-vaunted ‘irreversible’ historic process that was signed onto in the White House Rose Garden by Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, and William Jefferson Clinton has, for all intents and purposes, been unwound.

Netanyahu’s Thatcherite economics provided the unlikely subject of Shabtai’s 1999 book, Politika and the first third of J’Accuse is drawn from that volume, which also mourns the final collapse of Israel’s humanist, semi-socialist, pre-1967 ethos. The remainder of the poems here, beginning with two written about the now infamous shooting of twelve-year old Muhammad al-Dura as his father tried to protect him behind a barrel in Gaza, is taken from the final section of Shabtai’s most recent collection of Hebrew poems, Artzenu (Our Land). Many of the poems in that volume were first published on the weekend literary pages of Israel’s daily paper of record, Ha’aretz,the equivalent of their being featured in the New York Times Book Review, and were met with angry letters to the editor and threats of cancelled subscriptions. Ha’aretz refused to publish ‘J’Accuse’, the third poem written in the series (and perhaps the harshest and most prophetic of the lot), but ‘Passover, 2002’ was printed sometime later in a special holiday-edition of Ha’aretz a few days before the biggest and most joyful celebrations of the Israeli year. There was the intellectual readership of the nation, as it prepared for large family Seders, or vacation, being told:

You read the Haggadah
like swine . . .
Passover, however,
is stronger than you are.
Go outside and see:
the slaves are rising up . . .

Lines like these have gotten Shabtai in trouble steadily throughout the thirty-five years of his publishing career, and his provocations have been unsettling, to say the least. Like Archilochus the Scold, he moves with often disturbing ease between the poles of praise and scorn, lyric flight and biological matter-of-factness. If in the Greek-Anthology-like Domestic Poem (1976) Shabtai takes laconic inventory of the household, celebrating its concreteness, stability, and mystery –

The kitchen contains
an Eden
of wisdom
Wisdom nests
in fire and salt
the water supply
is mythological

– a few books later, in Love (1986), he erupts in a dithyrambic dismantlement of that domestic-Objectivist self: the violent return of a repressed old passion leads to a transformative moment of self-recognition and, later in the poem, and throughout his next several volumes, to the most sexually explicit and ribald work in the history of modern Hebrew poetry. Here too the tutelary spirits of his poetic tack are classical, and the comic and caustic are never far apart:

I’ve always missed out on the prettiest girls;
only after they’ve screwed in every hole and position
do they come to me for help with their poems, or a lesson,
and I tell them of Phoinix, whose lips dripped pearls

of wisdom and how, in exchange for the knowledge, he’d usually
get a comfortable bed with sheets of lambskin and, if he were lucky,
hear, in an adjacent tent – Patroklos
making love with Iphis, and Diomede with Akhileus.

So I won’t get to sleep with the prettiest girls.
I’ll fix their lines, put up with their stupid chatter,
and, late at night, comfort myself as I stick my finger . . .

from The Heart, 1994

The poet’s primary responsibility, Shabtai makes clear, is (at least on the level of literature) freshness, attentiveness, and surprise. And when things fall apart, the responsible writer can’t but apply these values to the least likely and perhaps most slippery of literary subjects – politics and public affairs. “In dark times will there also be singing?” Bertolt Brecht asks. “Yes”, he answers, “there will also be singing, about the dark times.”

*

The dark times in question are clearly darkest for the Palestinian people, and Shabtai is genuinely concerned about their situation and the treatment they have long suffered. Nevertheless, the Hebrew title of his most recent volume, Artzenu, which can also be translated Our Country, reminds us that what Shabtai knows best, and what courses through his veins, is Hebrew culture. What drives him to his desk in the “dim hour/ when the thud of the paper/ hitting the doorstep is heard” is his understanding that the fate of the ethical Hebrew culture in which he was raised is inextricably linked to the fate of Palestinian society and the Palestinian people, which his own government is doing its best to crush. The Hebrew language, the moral underpinnings of Israeli society, the very simplicity, modesty, and dailiness that he has embraced and championed throughout his writing life in some of the most powerful and original Hebrew poetry of the past thirty years – all are now endangered: “The pure words I suckled from my mother’s breasts: Man, Child, Justice, Mercy, and so on,/ are dispossessed before our eyes, imprisoned in ghettos, murdered at checkpoints.” To properly convey the extent of that threat and goad his reader into wakefulness, Shabtai will resort to the most theatrical of poetic gestures, and in the process risk, as he has put it, “poetic suicide”.

In doing so he looks back to other poets who have found in the mechanisms of state a fitting and necessary subject for poetry, despite the deep-seated and often unconscious assumption of many readers that politics inevitably devours or somehow thwarts the interior life of the individual, which they deem to be the poet’s proper concern. Throughout the poems of J’Accuse, then, the reader will hear deliberate echoes of – or homages to – Brecht and Mandelstam, Hikmet and Akhmatova, Pound, Eluard and numerous others. Beneath that one also notes the recovery of the moral perspective and apocalyptic tone, the universalism of the classical Hebrew prophets who raged against the corruption of the nation in biblical Samaria (Amos), and the political scene on the eve of the destruction of the First Temple (Jeremiah). Above all one feels the presence, again, of the Greek poets and dramatists whose work Shabtai has lived with and taught for some four decades now. For apart from his enfant-terrible poet status in Israel, Shabtai is best-known for his translations of Greek tragedy and comedy, which a generation of students has studied in brilliantly annotated volumes with appendices containing large selections of Greek lyric poetry as well. J’Accuse, one might say, involves a pan-Mediterranean application of lessons learned from all the writers listed above, as well as from the plain-spoken likes of Hesiod’s eighth-century B.C. tale of the Good City and the Bad City in Works and Days:

. . . When the judges of a town are fair
To foreigner and citizen alike,
Their city prospers and her people bloom;
Since Peace is in the land, her children thrive . . .

But there are some who till the fields of pride
And work at evil deeds; Zeus marks them out,
And often, all the city suffers for
Their wicked schemes, and on these men, from heaven
The son of Kronos sends great punishments . . .

In much of their work, as in many of the poems of J’Accuse, the personal is not the political; instead, the political becomes the personal, and the fate of the polis is the fate of the self.

These are, then, not poems of solace in the face of the tragic, as we have come to expect in the contemporary American context. They are, instead, poems of sentence by a poet who refuses to be silent before the barbaric and the brutal. They fulfill not only the traditional functions of political poetry – witnessing, remembrance, protest – but also, in their audacity, serve as a poet’s mirror held up to his people: one designed to show the nation its true reflection, now and in days to come.

Jerusalem, August 2002

Reprinted with permission from J’Accuse New Directions (New York), 2003