Artikel
Outspoken and intimate
29 november 2010
These lines are concrete and metaphorical: the Dionysian and Apollonian principles clash with each other. There is a reason that Nietzsche saw the contradiction between stormy desire and harmonious restraint as the conflict from which tragedy is born. This idea emerges in chilling fashion in ‘Woman of Valor’, a shocking requiem that reconstructs the sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of 35 soldiers on an air-force base.
In other poems erotic fantasy is presented against the sharp contrast of childlike innocence. As in the game Simon Says, in ‘Herzl Says’ [a man with an ordinary Hebrew name – or possibly the ‘visionary’ founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl] “ . . . says/ hands up/ Herzl says/ put your hands on your head”, but also, more pornographically, “Herzl says to me/ get down on your knees/ . . . / . . . I personally envisioned/ you spreading your legs/ and turning over.”
This poem ends with the speaker’s heartrending understanding that “the truth is mine only/ when I alone/ hold an apple in my mouth” – that mythological apple, the symbol of temptation, now a signifier of satisfaction derived on one’s own. Excerpted from Maariv newspaper, 12 April 2009.
Anat Zecharya’s first book “is filled with outspokenly erotic poems,” critic Yuval Paz notes in a review. A short guide to reading her work.
Zecharya’s poems cast disturbing doubt on what lies [along the continuum] between the longing to experiment with and experience pure sensuality, and the situation of victims of sexual abuse. Desire is represented in frank and direct language, unembellished: “I suck and swallow one guy/ like oxygen, I bite I curse/ French kiss/ with refined cannibalism, maximize/ pleasure from torment.” These lines are concrete and metaphorical: the Dionysian and Apollonian principles clash with each other. There is a reason that Nietzsche saw the contradiction between stormy desire and harmonious restraint as the conflict from which tragedy is born. This idea emerges in chilling fashion in ‘Woman of Valor’, a shocking requiem that reconstructs the sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of 35 soldiers on an air-force base.
In other poems erotic fantasy is presented against the sharp contrast of childlike innocence. As in the game Simon Says, in ‘Herzl Says’ [a man with an ordinary Hebrew name – or possibly the ‘visionary’ founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl] “ . . . says/ hands up/ Herzl says/ put your hands on your head”, but also, more pornographically, “Herzl says to me/ get down on your knees/ . . . / . . . I personally envisioned/ you spreading your legs/ and turning over.”
This poem ends with the speaker’s heartrending understanding that “the truth is mine only/ when I alone/ hold an apple in my mouth” – that mythological apple, the symbol of temptation, now a signifier of satisfaction derived on one’s own. Excerpted from Maariv newspaper, 12 April 2009.
© Yuval Paz
Vertaler: Lisa Katz
Bron: Maariv, 12 April 2009
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