Yehuda Amichai, one of the finest Hebrew poets of our time, requires no introduction from me. On the contrary, since those gathered here, I am sure, know Yehuda and his work far better than me or mine, it would have been more fitting for him to have introduced me. Nevertheless, there is one reason it is appropriate for me to present Yehuda tonight: I have a special relationship to the book for which he is being honoured, one story of which I translated; not only because I translated it, but because when I did so, nearly 25 years ago to the day, it was the first translation I had ever done—or rather, the first for which anyone paid me. It was—as they say in the world of athletics—the translation that cost me my amateur status and for which I was for the first time fully accountable as only a professional can be. For better or for worse, Yehuda is responsible for the fact that ever since then I have been earning a good part of my living as a translator, and it is a pleasure to repay him in part tonight.

Out of curiosity I looked this week at the translation in question—it is of a story called "The Battle for the Hill"—and in all honesty I believe I could do it better today. Indeed, if I may be permitted a brief aside on the subject of translation, while reading "The Battle for the Hill" I was struck by the fact that I had not yet begun to learn at the time what today seems to me (assuming, that is. a modicum of aptitude to begin with) the secret of all good translation, namely, the readiness to put aside the original as quickly as possible (once you have got down a rough first draft of it, of course), get it out of your mind, and concentrate on your own recreation of it. That was something I did not know then, being too much in awe of the text (as most beginning translators are) and the result was a good deal of stiffness, as happens in translation when the language translated into is not wearing its own clothes as it were, but is still going about dressed in the borrowed ones of the original language.

A very fine translator, Ralph Mannheim, who has been translating from German and French into English for more years than I have been alive, once wrote that every translator has to be an actor. That was not a thought to which I paid much attention when I read his article. I simply took it to mean that when you translate fiction in which there is usually a good deal of dialogue, you have to act the part of the characters, pretending you are them and asking how you would say what they would if they were speaking your own language. Today it seems to me that this is only part of what Mannheim meant. The rest is that when you translate you have to act the author himself. In other words, every good translator must also be a bit of an impersonator. If I am translating a story of Yehuda Amichai's into English, for example, I have to become Yehuda Amichai writing that story in English because Yehuda Amichai is now an English writer. That is the only way I can do a proper job. It is something I did not know 25 years ago.

On the subject of impersonation, it seems to me that Yehuda Amichai also appears here in the guise of an impersonator. That is, he is a poet impersonating a prose writer and although he does it very skillfully, his impersonation is not so impeccable that anyone reading him carefully does not realize that he is really a poet in disguise. In fact, I rather think that if we prose writers were better organized and had the kind of union regulations other professions do, this sort of thing would not be allowed. There would be strict rules against poets writing prose, just as there are injunctions against electricians doing the plumbing on a building site. You may ask: but why should prose writers care? It's true that poets sometimes write prose, but what is there to keep prose writers from writing poetry in retaliation? That may sound fair, but it's really about as equitable as the remark once made by Emile Zola that the rich and the poor are perfectly equal, since the rich have the same right as the poor to sleep in the streets. For though a poet can go slumming in the streets of prose whenever he wants, the reverse is simply not the case. It is a fact that although poets who have written good or excellent prose are not uncommon in the history of literature, prose writers who have written good poems are few indeed. Many may have wanted to dwell in the mansion of poetry but did not possess the price of admission.

If we ask why it seems so much easier for poets to write good prose than for prose writers to write good poetry, the first answer—that writing good poetry must be harder work than writing good prose—is not, I believe, true. Not only is writing good prose very hard work but writing poetry is not really work at all. It is something of an entirely different nature. Prose is something that, with a certain amount of talent and a lot of sheer grit, you can create; poetry is not. There is no way to will or to sweat poetry into existence. There is something magical in its creation, which may one day be discovered to be merely some special electro-magnetic tremor of the brain, but about which all we know in the meantime is that it either comes to you or it does not—if it does not, as the Song of Solomon says about love, it can be neither stirred up nor awakened until it pleaseth. Permit me to read a small section of a Socratic dialogue in which Socrates is having some fun with Ion, a young performer who has been awarded first prize at the Athenian festival for his reading of Homer, accompanying himself on the lyre. In it Socrates goes about proving to Ion that Ion himself does not understand the first thing about poetry, not because he is particularly dim-witted, but because no one can.

For all good poets, says Socrates, compose their beautiful poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains. For they tell us that they gather their strains from honeyed fountains out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; thither, like the bees, they wing their way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.

Those of us who, though not poets ourselves, have had the temerity to try writing poetry, know too well how painfully true are these words. Prose is a human endeavour, but poetry, as Socrates says, comes from the gods. And I must say that when a true poet writes prose it is as if someone a bit godlike were walking among men. What is it that gives him away in the end? Perhaps the very effortlessness of his performance; he never seems to exert himself at precisely those moments when even the best prose writers must pack all the literary muscle that they possess. True, he may sometimes write sentences like the rest of us; sooner or later he will make a too light or graceful movement, something gravity-defying from the point of view of prose, and make us realize suddenly that we are in the presence of a poet as the biblical Manoah realized he had seen an angel when the man he was talking to rose skyward before his eyes in a tongue of flame.

It is this almost acrobatic ease in Yehuda Amichai's stories that strikes me most when I read them. Prose has its own laws of gravity, its own laws of space and time that must be obeyed. We are told—and it is on the whole good advice—that a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. We are told that it must have a plot to impart to it the movement that will carry it from one point to another. We are told that it must have credible characters to give the plot mass. Yet when one reads the stories in The World is a Room, one sees that it is possible, although perhaps only if one is a poet, to thumb one's nose at all of these rules and write wonderful prose all the same. In this book there are stories that have beginnings and no ends. There are others that have ends and no beginnings. Some are all middles. One, "Love in Reverse", begins with its end and ends with its beginning. None has what might be called a plot. None has any characters worth speaking of. Nothing happens in the stories. Many of them even seem to be about that. In "The Battle for the Hill",a company of soldiers prepares for an imminent war that never breaks out. In "The Orgy" some friends plan and plan an orgy that never takes place. In "The Class Reunion", that reunion is never held. There is a story called "My Father's Deaths" in which a man dies and dies, and then dies again, and then really dies, and then dies and dies and dies and keeps on dying. If Auden was correct when he said that "poetry makes nothing happen," that description alone clearly labels these stories those of a poet.

Yet, if poetry makes nothing happen, what the stories in this book tell us is that there is one thing that truly and constantly does happen in this world, and that is poetry itself. The rest is illusion. We may think that it happens but it never does. We cannot even say what "it" is, for everything in these pages is a metaphor for something else, every event is an evocation of another, every situation is a correspondence or symbol that points away from itself. The world in Yehuda Amichai's stories is written in a code to which the poetic imagination alone has the key and the eye to discern the secret meanings and hidden relationships. Although the publisher has named this volume The World is a Room (after one of the stories in it), it might more accurately have been called "The World is a Poem."

Why then say it in prose? Because while the world may be a poem, a poem is not a world. A lyric poem is too much of a fragment for that task. It takes the stretch and breadth of prose to make a world—that is, to create a self-enclosed reality in which there is enough space, time, and extension to make us feel that we are within it and not just on the outside looking in. But it takes a poet writing prose to show us that such a reality is itself unending poetry. That is my sense of these stories. If any of you wish to take issue with it, allow me to defend myself by calling once more on the greatest and slyest of all philosophers. At the end of his dialogue with Ion, having thoroughly befuddled the young man and made him realize that he has little idea what his beloved Homer is all about, Socrates says: "And if, as I was saying, you have art, then I should say that in falsifying your promise to me that you would exhibit Homer, you are not dealing fairly with me. But if, as I believe, you have no art but speak all these words about Homer unconsciously and under his inspiring influence, then I acquit you of dishonesty and shall only say that you are inspired. Which do you prefer to be thought, dishonest or inspired?" To which, Ion, being no fool, answers, "There is a great difference, Socrates, between them, and inspiration is the far nobler alternative." "Then, Ion," Socrates generously concludes, "I shall assume the nobler alternative and attribute to you in your praises of Homer inspiration and not art."