Karen Alkalay-Gut
I’m
never going to forge a privileged connection
with
this land I have loved all my life.
I’ll
always live in a strange language
talking
to myself and maybe you
while
everyone here believes in Hebrew.
That’s
why I’m decided on a radical plan:
I’m
going to have to make some one up
who
could be my mirror,
only
more marketable:
a
long dead native woman poet
who
passed away without heirs
or
any translators
but
me.
I’ll
call her Ruth.
Ruth
Ibn Shoshan after my father
and
the orphaned Moabite
who
so made her way into our faith
she
got a book named after her,
and
maybe gave birth to David.
But
I’ll give her a real career –
not
just make her some
romantic
Russian agronomist
too
tubercular to work,
or
a professional poet demanding flowers
every
time her verse appears in the papers.
She’ll
be a nurse in WWII
busy
with passing information
from
the British to the Hagana
like
how they are going to run away
when
Rommell invades
and
leave us all to our just desserts.
From
her poems we’ll learn she’ll have
fallen
in love with one of them,
maybe
a British officer with blue eyes
injured
from an explosion in the desert
and
recovering slowly in her ward.
And
I’ll make her write him poems
full
of sea and sand and never ending
phoenixes
and bridges
and
the knowledge of how fragile
all
love must be in this dying world
with
the other world still only a dream.
But
of course he will understand
nothing
of her language
and
she will be doomed
to
read to him in his native tongue
--
verse from Browning –
to
make him feel less lost
in
this strange Tel Aviv colony.
In
the introduction to the translations
of
the poems I’ll invent,
I’ll
have her sitting at her table at night
when
she comes home from the hospital
—after
writing a letter to her mother in Jerusalem—
and
composing in verse what she cannot tell him
in
the formality of wound dressing.
Not
too erotic – after all, I don’t want to lose
The
modest potential critics and readers --
but
a little sexual fantasy can pique
even
the most fanatic beast.
I’d
make them short, intense lines,
full
of hidden local allusions
with
contemporary significance:
“Your
kiss will not protect me,
like
the lions that guard the gate
of
my mother’s home.”
“Can
the blue of your eyes
keep
the desert fox from my lair?”
“Every
day it seems
for
a moment as if…”
Well,
I’ll have to work on it
and
I’ll be the first to admit
it
loses in translation.
But
when I found her poems
among
the papers
of
the discarded archives of HaYarkon hospital
I’d
no choice but to try
to
give voice to her cry
for
love in the face of upheaval
unburdening
sharp desire
on
the edge of the world
I
would try to get the many levels–
not
just all the English in the Hebrew,
and
the literariness of that language back
then
but
the foreign models of elegant love she had to work with.
She
had probably read Hemingway
and
maybe even saw Casablanca,
and
was living the same experience and hope.
So
love me tonight
Tomorrow
was made for some
Tomorrow
may never come
For
all we know.
But
she had a homeland to look forward to,
a
hope.
And
then the war is over and he goes back home.
She
could go with him but to betray an unborn country
seems
too great a burden for love to bear.
And
she is needed to nurse the refugees.
So
she keeps writing him, about how everyone
is
reuniting in sadness here, or living with the absence
How
people fall into each other’s arms
from
despair after years of blackness.
And
maybe I’d say something
about
how when you scrape away
old
skin, new skin grows,
and
the under layer rises up
But
how would I answer the big riddle –
since
anyone writing in that revitalized tongue
was
a pioneer – even a woman –
Why
wasn’t she famous?
It
wasn’t for want of trying.
Maybe
you can see her back
In
some café photograph of bohemians in Kassit
Or
her hat at some literary event.
But
she wasn’t a part of the local scene,
didn’t
smoke or say intellectual things
and
her poems weren’t even acknowledged
when
they were sent to the journals.
Too
much western influence, too much pop culture,
not
enough Russian suffering, too much real world.
But
who was she to question
the
authority of the establishment.
So
she kept the poems in her desk
then
brought them to the hospital
to
destroy as worthless
but
was interrupted
by
a random bullet.
I
think I might get away with the scam
if
I say the archives burned down
after
I made my translations
the
way Amichai’s boat that brought him here
was
destroyed after the voyage.
It
would be a way to tell the untold story of this country
the
one I don’t have a right to tell from the inside
It
would be a way to make her famous,
my
‘translations’
the
basis for a Hollywood film
And
me the modest middleman