Editorial: 15 July 2011

29 juni 2011 The poems of the late T. Carmi, a US-born, Hebrew and English-speaking poet who moved to Israel via Paris in his twenties, are strikingly pared down, at times almost imagistic, at times proverb-like. I particularly love ‘Landscapes’, which, with a sort of sombre humour, reflects on being a witness, highlighting – through descriptions of the views that flash past on a train ride – the way observations (and the subsequent communication and representation) of events, landscape and the suffering of others are always incomplete, although our imagination and knowledge of the world tend to fill in the gaps. Better to focus on a single thing: and so, while the narrator begins by witnessing “One white bird on a green river, two / and then three” he moves to writing instead about “just one bird. / Perhaps only wings.”

Aryeh Sivan intertwines personal and national experience within his lyrical poems; as Shai Dotan wrote, “[in Sivan’s work] the private is not relinquished for the sake of the national, but rather the national is part of and subject to private experience”. Poems such as ‘Tel Aviv in the Forties’, set in the poet’s childhood, openly reflect on this confluence and formation of individual and communal Israeli identity:

. . . the librarian sits at the entrance
and tells the children looking for books about heroes, page-turners with adventures
not only Tarzan, child, not Jules Verne
and not even Sienkiewicz of In Desert and Wilderness.
Take Memories of the House of David,
it will keep you in suspense reading the history of your nation,
connect you to your past:
and you will know why and where you came from
to our beautiful, hot country

Although Sivan acknowledges the role of the past in the formation of identity, he also cautions against the baggage of history. “Don’t make things hard for your inheritors”, he writes, in the beautiful ‘Inheritance’. After all, the “many shirts” bequeathed to him by deceased relatives can’t all be worn; Sivan here seems to advocate flexibility and letting go, rather than maintaining an anxious desire to cling onto and pass on everything to the next generation. Although in this poem no overt reference is made to history or nationhood, one senses Sivan advocates more than simply getting rid of physical junk before the end of your life – aspects of cultural, religious and national identity and traditions passed along from generation to generation can be a burden too.

Sivan’s ‘Tel Aviv in the Forties’ resonates against ‘Hit’, a poem by the final poet of this issue, Tal Nitzán: “In Buenos Aires I didn’t go / looking for my childhood home” she writes. “No, I renounce / nostalgia’s phony charms.” Yet the narrator hasn’t forgotten “a single line to a song” from her childhood; and what is more, now the “clear voice singing along” is her daughter’s; the narrator realises “with distaste” that memory is not so easily erased within a life – and the next generation might still sing the same old song. A poet of Argentine origin, Nitzán is also a translator of Hispanic and English-language literature into Hebrew, and a peace activist. Her sensitivity to others’ suffering is evident in poems such as ‘The Canary’ – a moving depiction of survival and endurance in the face of threats to safety and home – and ‘Grace’, a poem that commands someone to renounce trying to stop all the world’s suffering and instead to “tend to your own home”, giving “One caress / for one cat / in the world.” It is akin to the way T. Carmi’s poem ‘Landscape’ named multiple things, only to set them aside and focus on a single object: to be a good witness and poet, to bring about change and healing, these poets seem to say, is perhaps best done selectively, but done well – one small but determined action at a time.