Amichai’s English translator was Ted Hughes. I wonder what these two poets saw in one another. Perhaps it was the simplicity of their poems, the straightforward world of their poetry or the same point of view of their same generation. I can’t think of two more seemingly different poets – Hughes who was as sharp as a blade and Amichai who was softer and filled with metaphors, but that is not the point that I would like to make this week. This week I would like to refer to old age. In my quest in the creative dictionary of the writing world what Hughes, Yehoshua, Heller and Kawabata represent to me are four points of view on something ancient and mysterious. They are here to teach us very valuable lessons about writing and the representation of life experience. But to start with, I’ll talk about Hughes and his poems.
Venerable elder! Let us learn of you.
Read us a lesson, a plain lesson how
Experience has worn of made you anew
That on this humble kitchen wall hang now,
O dew that condensed of the breath of the Word
On the mirror of the syllable of the word
From, ‘The man seeking experience enquires his way of a drop of water’
What can be said about Hughes that has not already been said? He was born in 1930 in a small village in Yorkshire, perhaps the last place that would fit a poet, a gloomy village of a bruised population. When he received The White Goddess of Robert Graves, who called to return to the worship of the ancient muse, with dread and love his interest in mysticism grew and during his army service, (an experience that shaped many writers and artists), he was given a chance to dig deep into Shakespeare. I said earlier that he and Amichai possessed very different qualities. Admiring nature and giving life a metaphysical dimension belong in part to the Hebrew poetry of the first three decades of the 20th century but also from digging in something that might seem old. By taking on animal personas, by taking on the masks of the shaman and the trickster, Hughes connected in a new way to ancient ideas and brought new meanings to the old nature poetry, making it green poetry. My private definition for this week is not just about writing about the elderly, but a portrait of the artist as an old man. The selection of poems that I’m holding in my hand doesn’t have many poems with ars-poetic dimension but I would love to refer to two poems that sort of fit this week’s category. In ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ we read the lines:
“Moon!” you cry suddenly, “Moon! Moon!”
The moon had stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.
This ability to twist reality to look it over is a wonderful thing when it’s being used properly, and we can see something like this in his poem ‘Theology’.
The other poem I would like to refer you to is ‘Cadenza’, who talks about a violinist who causes an explosion at an orchestra. In it we can read the lines:
And I am the cargo
Of a coffin attended by swallows
And I am the water
Bearing the coffin that will not be silent
And his descriptions of that self are becoming more and more special and I believe that this is his way of connecting with some persona far greater and enchanted than he.