Artikel
Three views of Orit Gidali
5 november 2014
Sighting Orit Gidali’s small [first] book in a store, it’s difficult not to be stopped in one’s tracks by the title, [literally] Twenty Girls to Envy. What does this mean? What kind of Hebrew sentence is this? The title is so exceptional that it’s hard not to take the book in your hand and skim through it looking for an explanation for the inexplicable name. An initial riffling reveals its context in the poem ‘Invisible Stitches’ [in which the speaker wakes up in bed and contemplates her lover lying beside her]:
My beloved [holds] the sheet
as if it were the mold of my body.
If I want to explain it
I will have to twist my back.
(If I were to write about him for seven years,
the seven bad years wouldn’t come)
My beloved is spread before me,
his head within the frame of the pillow.
If I had money I would hire
twenty girls to envy me.
Reading the poem makes it hard to remember that just a moment ago the words were disconnected, impenetrable and foreign. As if deciphering the title while looking through the book contained something of the act of love: the passage from an intriguing, lovely remoteness to intimacy, understanding and warmth.
The words do not, however, remain in a secure and warm realm. The unease that had vanished for a moment raises its head again. The questions don’t stop coming. Why does the speaker need an external proof of her love? Why does this proof have to take the form of envy? Why is a financial consideration stuck into an intimate discourse of love? Why twenty? Why is it enough for the speaker to simply hire them? That is, why limit the fantasy to rental? After all, we are dealing with fantasy here. Who is putting the brakes on?
Eli Hirsh, Yedioth Aharonot (Seven Nights), 6 March 2009
Orit Gidali burst into the Israeli poetry scene riding on not only her talent, but also her dramatic life story . . .
I know that it’s unacceptable . . . to interpret work from a biographical point of view. I understand this resistance but don’t completely accept it. Clearly there’s a complicated, divided, lacunae-filled relationship between an artist’s tangled life stories and the tangled ones in her art. A literary work . . . is after all a branch of fiction where lies are useful and invention is enjoyable, and whoever doesn’t understand the difference between the two [sets of narratives] doesn’t understand poetry. But whoever believes that it is possible to understand one without taking the other into account is likely to completely miss the point.
Her first book, Twenty Girls to Envy Me, exhibited Gidali’s talent for turning a story into a poem. In her second, Closing In, the tension between story and poem is dialed up a notch, because of the opening cycle, ‘Songs to a dead woman’ for one reason among others. The poet approaches the disappearing first wife in a sharp, almost violent [use of] second person in the section ‘You’:
No, maybe only the poem forgets.
Do not come in. Do not come and mar the clean taps in the house.
Do not give any nostalgia to the man whose life you made into a chimney,
and do not send ghosts into my pregnant stomach
about to give birth.
Do not cause damage; what is between you and me
will never be settled.
I am writing you from the hurt of the language of the second person
which doesn’t have a new fragrance to give.
Curse of Rachel and Leah burning on my tongue,
this curse of she who does not know which of them she is.
The cycle has five sections: ‘You’, ‘Your Daughter’, ‘Your Husband’, ‘Your Home’, ‘Your Victory’. Beyond these five titles it’s impossible not to hear five complementary headings . . .: I, My Daughter, My Husband, My Home, My Victory. It is impossible to write such difficult poetry – not hard to understand but hard to speak aloud – without both courage and talent, a great determination to be precise and a sharp ability to distinguish between what’s important and what’s not. A powerful hand must wield an iron pen to sing this story without blurring it or falsifying or drowning in kitsch, and in order to produce broader significance from it.
Yitzhak Laor, Haaretz, 7 June 2009
The spirit has visited Orit Gidali. The establishment of a nuclear family has not made her part of the process of becoming bourgeois that Israeli poetry is undergoing. I’ll call the spirit that rises from Closing In holy. Here’s a Sabbath poem in prose ‘We could have lived so well’:
In a little while Shabbat in the Sharon, and traffic lights take off their red, and the laces unravel and yield the bare foot, and the records of the word gather into a book and rest from their anxiousness to break, and the change in the wallet emphasizes the victory of the many and the small, and the expiration dates on the milk do not threaten to be expired . . .
Does all this really happen? Does all this really happen just for a moment? Isn’t this a declaration of the great beauty sparked for a moment when the traffic lights lose their red color [and switch over to blinking yellow for the duration of the Jewish Sabbath, from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday]? If I could, I would simply copy out this book . . . without saying another word, I would do this, but after all I’m supposed to write a few words about this poetry, and so I’ll begin from the point that these lines – at last – are a fitting way of dealing with what Yehuda Amichai left behind, because out of fear of his influence, no one has ever approached his treasure.
No, Orit Gidali does not write “like” Yehuda Amichai . . . but there is something here that Amichai liked to do, to break down our cultural-linguistic structures and give them a different life. More than anything else, there is in this book a great effort to say ‘yes’, without becoming bourgeois, without adorning oneself with exotic fruits or names gathered from a dictionary of Greek mythology. What arises from this book is Gidali’s great abundance.
Translator's note: All quotations from poems are taken from their English translation by Marcela Sulak.
In these excerpts, three Israeli reviewers examine different facets of Orit Gidali's poetry: how her first book nearly jumped into David Zonshein's hand, because the title seemed so odd; the connection between Gidali's life and her work is examined by Eli Hirsh; and Yitzhak Laor finds in her poetry a spark of holiness.
David Zonshein, Haaretz,14 January 2005Sighting Orit Gidali’s small [first] book in a store, it’s difficult not to be stopped in one’s tracks by the title, [literally] Twenty Girls to Envy. What does this mean? What kind of Hebrew sentence is this? The title is so exceptional that it’s hard not to take the book in your hand and skim through it looking for an explanation for the inexplicable name. An initial riffling reveals its context in the poem ‘Invisible Stitches’ [in which the speaker wakes up in bed and contemplates her lover lying beside her]:
My beloved [holds] the sheet
as if it were the mold of my body.
If I want to explain it
I will have to twist my back.
(If I were to write about him for seven years,
the seven bad years wouldn’t come)
My beloved is spread before me,
his head within the frame of the pillow.
If I had money I would hire
twenty girls to envy me.
Reading the poem makes it hard to remember that just a moment ago the words were disconnected, impenetrable and foreign. As if deciphering the title while looking through the book contained something of the act of love: the passage from an intriguing, lovely remoteness to intimacy, understanding and warmth.
The words do not, however, remain in a secure and warm realm. The unease that had vanished for a moment raises its head again. The questions don’t stop coming. Why does the speaker need an external proof of her love? Why does this proof have to take the form of envy? Why is a financial consideration stuck into an intimate discourse of love? Why twenty? Why is it enough for the speaker to simply hire them? That is, why limit the fantasy to rental? After all, we are dealing with fantasy here. Who is putting the brakes on?
Eli Hirsh, Yedioth Aharonot (Seven Nights), 6 March 2009
Orit Gidali burst into the Israeli poetry scene riding on not only her talent, but also her dramatic life story . . .
I know that it’s unacceptable . . . to interpret work from a biographical point of view. I understand this resistance but don’t completely accept it. Clearly there’s a complicated, divided, lacunae-filled relationship between an artist’s tangled life stories and the tangled ones in her art. A literary work . . . is after all a branch of fiction where lies are useful and invention is enjoyable, and whoever doesn’t understand the difference between the two [sets of narratives] doesn’t understand poetry. But whoever believes that it is possible to understand one without taking the other into account is likely to completely miss the point.
Her first book, Twenty Girls to Envy Me, exhibited Gidali’s talent for turning a story into a poem. In her second, Closing In, the tension between story and poem is dialed up a notch, because of the opening cycle, ‘Songs to a dead woman’ for one reason among others. The poet approaches the disappearing first wife in a sharp, almost violent [use of] second person in the section ‘You’:
No, maybe only the poem forgets.
Do not come in. Do not come and mar the clean taps in the house.
Do not give any nostalgia to the man whose life you made into a chimney,
and do not send ghosts into my pregnant stomach
about to give birth.
Do not cause damage; what is between you and me
will never be settled.
I am writing you from the hurt of the language of the second person
which doesn’t have a new fragrance to give.
Curse of Rachel and Leah burning on my tongue,
this curse of she who does not know which of them she is.
The cycle has five sections: ‘You’, ‘Your Daughter’, ‘Your Husband’, ‘Your Home’, ‘Your Victory’. Beyond these five titles it’s impossible not to hear five complementary headings . . .: I, My Daughter, My Husband, My Home, My Victory. It is impossible to write such difficult poetry – not hard to understand but hard to speak aloud – without both courage and talent, a great determination to be precise and a sharp ability to distinguish between what’s important and what’s not. A powerful hand must wield an iron pen to sing this story without blurring it or falsifying or drowning in kitsch, and in order to produce broader significance from it.
Yitzhak Laor, Haaretz, 7 June 2009
The spirit has visited Orit Gidali. The establishment of a nuclear family has not made her part of the process of becoming bourgeois that Israeli poetry is undergoing. I’ll call the spirit that rises from Closing In holy. Here’s a Sabbath poem in prose ‘We could have lived so well’:
In a little while Shabbat in the Sharon, and traffic lights take off their red, and the laces unravel and yield the bare foot, and the records of the word gather into a book and rest from their anxiousness to break, and the change in the wallet emphasizes the victory of the many and the small, and the expiration dates on the milk do not threaten to be expired . . .
Does all this really happen? Does all this really happen just for a moment? Isn’t this a declaration of the great beauty sparked for a moment when the traffic lights lose their red color [and switch over to blinking yellow for the duration of the Jewish Sabbath, from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday]? If I could, I would simply copy out this book . . . without saying another word, I would do this, but after all I’m supposed to write a few words about this poetry, and so I’ll begin from the point that these lines – at last – are a fitting way of dealing with what Yehuda Amichai left behind, because out of fear of his influence, no one has ever approached his treasure.
No, Orit Gidali does not write “like” Yehuda Amichai . . . but there is something here that Amichai liked to do, to break down our cultural-linguistic structures and give them a different life. More than anything else, there is in this book a great effort to say ‘yes’, without becoming bourgeois, without adorning oneself with exotic fruits or names gathered from a dictionary of Greek mythology. What arises from this book is Gidali’s great abundance.
Translator's note: All quotations from poems are taken from their English translation by Marcela Sulak.
© David Zonshein, Eli Hirsh, Yitzhak Laor
Vertaler: Lisa Katz
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