[In the following review, Slavitt examines Amichai's characteristic use of irony.]

The language of Jews, the real mother tongue, is not Yiddish or Hebrew, as it certainly is not Russian, or Polish, or English, but … irony. The complicated experiences of five millennia have elicited a series of emotional and linguistic postures by which we Jews express ourselves, and it is these double messages that American Jews have always found particularly interesting as well as demanding. Until Korea, the United States had never lost a war, and there was a sappy optimism, part positive thinking, part togetherness, part Chamber of Commerce boosterism, that seemed unrecognizable to us and, with a particular force, made us aware of our foreignness. Only the Southerners, who had lost the Civil War, had any notion of the mysterious ways of history and destiny, or understood that there can be an aristocracy of suffering. Young Jewish men and women reading William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor were reassured by the discovery of these un-American, recognizably sane, and unimpeachably grown-up voices.

Yehuda Amichai's popularity, in Israel and here as well, owes much, I think, to his reliance on irony. His poems have that authentic ring of the words of some wise-ass uncle who is always joking around but whose jokes, we come to learn as we grow up, are more often than not in deadly earnest. Amichai's voice, even in translation from the Hebrew, has that unmistakable edge to it. He seems to make light of what is serious and terrible, but his remarks are scalpel-sharp so that the quick scratch we hardly felt is suddenly gushing with our blood.

Here, for instance, is one of his "Seven Laments for the War-Dead":

    Dicky was hit.
    Like the water tower at Yad Mordekhai.
    Hit. A hole in the belly. Everything
    came flooding out.
 
    But he has remained standing like that
    in the landscape of my memory
    like the water tower at Yad Mordekhai.
 
    He fell not far from there,
    a little to the north, near Houlayquat.

This is as funny as a lament gets. The bizarre comparison between Dicky's gore pouring out of him and the water tower's water spilling down is unseemly, but then any such death is unseemly, and the only way to be faithful to it is to hold onto it, clutching its absurdity all the more tightly, holding onto its homely truth. The specificity ("not far from there, / a little to the north, near Houlayquat") hangs there, tight-lipped and eloquent. Even though Houlayquat is now Hetetz, for Dicky, and for Amichai's memory of his death, time stopped.

This translation, alas, is not from the new generous selection of Amichai's verse that Benjamin and Barbara Harshav have just published (Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry) but from a smaller volume that Harper brought out eight years ago and is still in print, Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited and translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. The Harshav version of the same poem is rather less fortunate:

     Dicky was hurt
     Like the water tower in Yad Mordekhay.
     Hurt. A hole in his belly. Everything
     Flowed out of him.
 
     But he remained standing like that
     In the landscape of my memory.
     Like the water tower in Yad Mordekhay.
 
     He fell not far from there,
     A bit to the north, near Huleikat.

Hurt? Killed is more like it. "Hit" is better because it is so much worse than "hurt" and doesn't hold out any false hopes. The tense of the Mitchell version's second stanza, suggesting that he has even up to the present moment remained standing is better than the imperfect which, in English, is indistinguishable from the passé simple. The Harshavs' verb implies that the action may be completed, while the whole point of the poem is its demonstration that the macabre and dreadful scene won't go away.

In one of his famous pieces, "The Real Hero," Amichai demonstrates something of the appeal he has always had for those who, like me, are more certain of their Jewishness than of their religious faith or even their politics. He tells the difficult story of Abraham's sacrifice in this way:

      The real hero of the Isaac story was the ram,
      who didn't know about the conspiracy between the others.
      As if he had volunteered to die instead of Isaac.
      I want to sing a song in his memory—
      about his curly wool and his human eyes,
      about the horns that were so silent on his living head,
      and how they made those horns into shofars when he was
      slaughtered
      to sound their battle cries
      or to blare out their obscene joy.
 
      I want to remember the last frame
      like a photo in an elegant fashion magazine:
      the young man tanned and manicured in his jazzy suit
      and beside him the angel, dressed for a party
      in a long silk gown,
      both of them empty-eyed, looking
      at two empty places,
      and behind them, like a colored backdrop, the ram,
      caught in the thicket before the slaughter.
      The thicket was his last friend.
 
      The angel went home.
      Isaac went home.
      Abraham and God had gone long before.
 
      But the real hero of the Isaac story
      was the ram.

The subversive suggestion about how "they" made those horns into shofars for battle cries and the sounding of obscene joy is particularly welcome to me. "They" are the official spokesmen, whether governments or rabbis. In its imaginative expression, Judaism is somewhere else, and its wise guys are often closer to the complicated truth of things than its ostensible wise men.

Writing in The Nation some years ago, Mark Rudman called Amichai "one of the half-dozen leading poets in the world," saying that he "has found a voice that speaks across cultural boundaries and a vision so sure that he can make the conflicts of the citizen soldier in modern Israel stand for those of humankind." One of the half-dozen leading poets in the world? But it isn't hyperbole. Try to think of a sextet to outshine him. Czeslaw Milosz? Geoffrey Hill? Richard Wilbur? Derek Walcott? Zbigniew Herbert, maybe? And who else?

Here is "Huleikat—the Third Poem about Dicky" in the Harshavs' version (it is a piece Amichai wrote after the Selected Poetry volume):

      In the hills, even the towers of oil wells
      Are a mere memory. Here Dicky fell,
      Four years older than me, like a father to me
      In times of trouble and distress. Now I am older than him
      By forty years and I remember him
      Like a young son, and I am his father, old and grieving.
 
      And you, who remember only faces,
      Do not forget the hands stretched out,
      The feet running lightly,
      The words.
      Remember: even the departure to terrible battles
      Passes by gardens and windows
      And children playing, a dog barking.
 
      Remind the fallen fruit
      Of its leaves and branches,
      Remind the sharp thorns
      How soft and green they were in springtime,
      And do not forget,
      Even a fist
      Was once an open palm and fingers.

The Biblical tonality is not an accident. Amichai is a psalmist of our time, and the Bible haunts him with its presence—inescapable and often inconvenient, like the rubble of Jerusalem in which it is all but impossible to dig without making archeological finds. It may be interesting to scholars, but it makes life difficult for the people who are trying to put up buildings or improve roadways.

Amichai's reputation in Israel and among Jews in the United States is well established, and I confess I opened this new collection of his work with a slight narrowing of my eyes, a slightly skeptical attitude prompted by my belief that, for poets at least, too much popularity is a danger sign. Amichai has a persona—the soldier poet, the cynical lover, the tender tough-guy—that comes through in a cumulative way and is suspiciously cozy. But one realizes that he is not at all a naif, that he is quite aware of this mask, and that he enjoys wearing it and working it for rhetorical purposes. It is not unlike Frost's pose of the craggy Vermont farmer, which he used as much as a disguise as anything else. Amichai is like Frost and Cavafy, too, perhaps, coming on in an aggressively parochial way but knowing that by the strategies of metaphor and metonymy we will refract what he is saying until it is more or less what he meant in the first place. In other words, in his poems he enlists us as his collaborators, and we have the giddy feeling of having had some small share in their creation.