#yehuda amichai

[mournfulroses]

Yehuda Amichai, from Selected Poetry of Y. Amichai; “The End of Elul,” (edited)

[adiradirim]

"I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open," Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch

[apoemaday]

A Man in His Life

by Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn’t have time in his life to have time for everything. He doesn’t have seasons enough to have a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, to laugh and cry with the same eyes, with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, to make love in war and war in love. And to hate and forgive and remember and forget, to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest what history takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time. When he loses he seeks, when he finds he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul is very professional. Only his body remains forever an amateur. It tries and it misses, gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing, drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn, Shriveled and full of himself and sweet, the leaves growing dry on the ground, the bare branches pointing to the place where there’s time for everything.

[woundgallery]

[havingapoemwithyou]

a pity, we were such a good invention by yehuda amichai tr. assia gutmann

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Herta Muller

That is why it is not even considered whether the worldwide outrage over the many dead and the suffering in Gaza might not be part of Hamas’ strategy. It is deaf and blind to the suffering of its people. Why else would it fire on the Kerem Shalom border crossing, where most aid supplies arrive? Or why else would it fire on the construction site of a temporary harbor, where aid supplies are soon to arrive? We have not heard a single word of sympathy for the people of Gaza from Mr. Sinwar and Mr. Haniye. And instead of a desire for peace, only maximum demands that they know Israel cannot fulfill. Hamas is betting on a permanent war with Israel. It would be the best guarantee of its continued existence. Hamas also hopes to isolate Israel internationally, at any cost.

In Thomas Mann’s novel “Doktor Faustus”, National Socialism is said to have “made everything German unbearable to the world”. I have the impression that the strategy of Hamas and its supporters is to make everything Israeli, and therefore everything Jewish, unbearable to the world. Hamas wants to maintain anti-Semitism as a permanent global mood. That is why it also wants to reinterpret the Shoah. The Nazi persecution and the rescue flight to Palestine are also to be called into question. And ultimately, the right of Israel to exist. This manipulation goes as far as to claim that German Holocaust remembrance only serves as a cultural weapon to legitimize the Western-white “settlement project” of Israel. Such ahistorical and cynical reversals of the perpetrator-victim relationship are intended to prevent any differentiation between the Shoah and colonialism. With all these stacked constructs, Israel is no longer seen as the only democracy in the Middle East, but as a colonialist model state. And as an eternal aggressor, against whom blind hatred is justified. And even the desire for its destruction.

The Jewish poet Yehuda Amichai says that a love poem in Hebrew is always a poem about war. Often it is a poem about war in the middle of a war. His poem “Jerusalem 1973” is reminiscent of the Yom Kippur War:

“Sad men carry the memory of their loved ones in their backpack, in their side pockets on their ammunition belts, in the bags of their souls, in heavy dream bubbles under their eyes.”

When Paul Celan visited Israel in 1969, Amichai translated Celan’s poems and read them out in Hebrew. This was where two survivors of the Shoah met. Jehuda Amichai was called Ludwig Pfeuffer when his parents fled from Würzburg.

The visit to Israel stirred Celan. He met school friends from Czernowitz in Romania who, unlike his murdered parents, had been able to escape to Palestine. Paul Celan wrote to Jehuda Amichai after his visit and shortly before his death in the Seine: “Dear Jehuda Amichai, let me repeat the word that came spontaneously to my lips during our conversation: I cannot imagine the world without Israel; nor do I want to imagine it without Israel.”

[deckerstarareotp]

“Look, just as time isn't inside clocks love isn't inside bodies: bodies only tell the love.”

Malex- for @befitandchase

Roswell New mexico 4x11/Archilochos translated by Anne Carson, in “Eros the Bittersweet”/Yehuda Amichai/Roswell New Mexico/Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun/Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena/Hieu Minh Nguyen, from “Nguyen”, Not Here/Roswell,New Mexico 3x08

Credits to gifs and quotes found: @weltenwellen @kendallroycos @metamorphesque @flowerytale @bisexualalienss

[hairtusk]

Yehuda Amichai, from 'Six Songs for Tamar' (trans. Harold Schimmel)

[majestativa]

You are beautiful, like prophecies, and sad, like those that come true, calm, like the calmness afterward. Black like the white loneliness of jasmine. With sharpened fangs: she wolf and queen.

— Yehuda Amichai, Love poems: A Bilingual Edition, (1981)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

From The Book of Miracles (Augsburger Wunderzeichenbuch), c. 1550. Source

* * * *

Love is not the last room: there are others after it, the whole length of the corridor that has no end. - Yehuda Amichai

[alive on all channels]

[seekingstars]

The Diameter of The Bomb - Yehuda Amichai

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded. And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle. And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God. 

[mournfulroses]

Yehuda Amichai, from Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai; “Solomon Waits,”

[contremineur]

You are silent, like prophecies, and sad, like those that are fulfilled, calm, like the calmness afterward.

Yehuda Amichai, opening lines to Majestic love song

in Amen (tr. Ted Hughes, Oxford University Press 1978)

I'm not sure I have the correct punctuation for this particular translation – happy to be set straight...

[cynthpop29]

[anchorsnreignbows]

[havingapoemwithyou]

wildpeace by yehuda amichai