The New Criterion

In the short history of Israeli letters, two women have loomed large: Yona Wallach and Dahlia Ravikovitch. Wallach said of Ravikovitch, “[She] doesn’t deal enough with sex. She’s not revolutionary enough. She doesn’t pay attention to how differently she writes from me. She isn’t a feminist.” What Wallach counts as vices let us call virtues. Ravikovitch had the final say with a tongue-in-cheek elegy for her rival Wallach: “Yona, shalom,/ this time I’m the one who’s talking/ and you won’t interrupt anymore./ Now, God help us, you’re in the ranks of the holy and pure./ … . you are one dead girl.”

This acid irony, coexisting with an idiosyncratic assertion of the divine, is the trademark voice that made Ravikovitch one of the most beloved and honored Israeli poets before her death in 2005. Bloch and Kronfeld are the “two Chanas” behind Open Closed Open, the acclaimed translation of Yehuda Amichai, and it is fitting that they have now taken up the task of “opening” Ravikovitch up to an English readership. Like Amichai, Ravikovitch uses the Bible: not piously, but as a scaffolding from which to build firm structures. Here the two Chanas tackle the more intricate, allusive Biblical work that Bloch omitted in previous translations of Ravikovitch. Both in the text and in the very helpful footnotes, the English reader can now sense the ductile forms and blunt wit of the poet’s Statehood Generation Hebrew (Ravikovitch, unlike Amichai, spoke Hebrew from birth).

The weakest poems are overtly political, written in the wake of the 1982 Lebanon War. Ravikovitch adopts the standard engaged-and-enraged pose of the Israeli intellectual elite, but the images in these poems are tropes, far from the incantatory singularity of “On the road at night there stands the man” or the post-apocalyptic “How Hong Kong Was Destroyed.”

Over and against Wallach’s protests, Ravikovitch is best known for “Clockwork Doll,” the anthemic sonnet of 1970s Israeli feminism:

I was a clockwork doll, but then
That night I turned round and around
And fell on my face, cracked on the ground,
And they tried to piece me together again.

Then once more I was a proper doll
And all my manner was nice and polite.
And I became damaged goods that night,
A fractured twig poised for a fall.

As much as Ravikovitch’s poetry insists on her debility, as much as she craves the white nihilism of “vanilla” or snarls in exasperation at the prosaic realities of the poet’s life (“To hell with the poem, I need 120 New Shekels”), “Clockwork Doll” also shows the extraordinary stylistic control that lets her poems hum their messages like tuning forks. “Hovering at a Low Altitude,” which plays on Israeli slang for helicopter patrols, is a metaphor of political detachment. “I am not here,” the speaker repeatedly insists. “I’ve seen worse things in my life.” Like the rubbed-raw voice of Lamentations, whose first verse she makes use of, Ravikovitch, just when at the breaking point, reaches visionary heights.