A person must sing

30 november 2010 Yair Hurwitz called the line “A child I say and I say eight years old”, from the poem ‘Innocence and Abyss and Existence’, “the most difficult line I ever wrote and in my opinion the most precise”. He made this statement in an interview with Helit Yeshurun in [the literary journal] Hedarim in 1988, the last year of his short life, in what is an essential interview for understanding the poet and his work.

The most difficult line? Yes, because it bears the weight of “an enormous world of emotion”. And why is this so? Because he was eight years old when his father died. There is a lot to say about the poet’s father as the source of much of his poetry – much more, it seems to me, even than with regards to the work of Dahlia Ravikovitch, whose father also died in her childhood and determined several of her major emotional stances. I will make do with the assumption that Hurwitz’s line is the most difficult of all and the most precise because it is free of metaphor and states the unembellished truth about what is usually thought of as poetry.

From this point of view it is certainly an exceptional line in Yair Hurwitz’s work, because Hurwitz is clearly the most poetic of all the members of his generation of poets. Yeshurun asked him about his relationship to the poetry of Meir Wieseltier and Yona Wallach, and he answered, “A very warm relationship. I really like things which are unlike me.”

And they are definitely nothing at all like him. Not Wieseltier, with his aggressively sharp tongue, and not Wallach, with her all-encompassing inflation, and not Aharon Shabtai with his seemingly objective minimalism. And even more unlike him is the dominant model rejected by all of them – Natan Zach, against whose irony (without ever mentioning Zach’s name) Hurwitz protested many times in the interview. “I have never understood,” Hurwitz said, “why irony has to be a principle of poetry.”

“I don’t want irony, and I don’t want tricks or anything [but] to speak from the most painful or joyful place, or a person’s most sensitive experience, in the most direct way.” And then [he says about] his line on the eight-year-old boy: “The sentence is weighted with an enormous world of emotion, and that’s what poetry should transmit, which answers the question about irony. What do I need irony for? I need to be precise about my experience, and make it happen for my fellow man.”

And since Zach’s sophisticated irony has been rejected, it is possible to adopt Zach’s own rejected [poetic] father – Grandfather Nathan Alterman, “who my poetry friends really don’t like, but I like very much, and like him to this day, one of two or three people I really miss.”

Alterman was acceptable to Hurwitz, among other reasons, because his language, which Hurwitz’s generation “couldn’t stand”, has something which “rises above the way people speak”, he said, explaining that “if I use everyday language, I won’t get anywhere.”

“I want,” he said, “for poetry to be poetry [ . . . ] Since the day I became conscious of poetry, I became aware that we have a language that sings. Not the way we usually speak every day.” In conclusion, he said, “A person must sing.”

When I said that Hurwitz is the most poetic member of his generation, my intention was to pure poeticism, in the sense that all functions of language that are not poetic have been relinquished. It is poetry without irony, wisecracks, everyday language. And one may add: without ideas, descriptions, mimesis, and, from a particular point of view, without images. It is true that the material of imagery is there, but it does not coalesce into real visual pictures. One wonderful poem, ‘Mayim ohmdeem’ (Standing water), is constructed completely of sense suggestions – blue and green water, a copper color, and that of a reddish berry and blood and light – but it is no more figurative than a painting by Turner, in which the play of colors wins out over mimesis and heads toward the abstract. It is just that with Hurwitz, games are played with words and sounds in airy, semantic sprays, endlessly elusive. Excerpted from a review of The Collected Poems of Yair Hurwitz (Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008) in the Haaretz book supplement, 25 August 2008.  Shimon Sandbank is a scholar and an Israel Prize laureate for his work in translation.