Dan Pagis and the poetry of displacement.

It is a curious fact that the three leading Hebrew poets of the generation that began to publish shortly after the founding of the State of Israel were all born in German-speaking Europe-Dan Pagis in Bukovina, Yehuda Amichai in Bavaria, and Nathan Zach in Berlin. Of the three, Pagis's cultural displacement was the most drastic. Zach and Amichai both were brought to Palestine with their families in the mid-1930s, Zach at the age of five and Amichai at the age of twelve. Pagis did not reach Palestine until 1946, after having spent the first part of his adolescence in a Nazi concentration camp. The product of a Germanized Jewish home in what was once an eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he probably never would have known Hebrew, never have had any serious connection with Israel or the Jewish cultural heritage, had he not been expelled from Europe by this ghastly spasm of historical violence and cast, for lack of any other haven, into the Middle East.

In the astonishing space of three or four years, he was publishing poetry in his newly learned language. This rapid determination to become a poet in Hebrew, I venture to guess, was not only a young person's willed act of adaptation but also the manifestation of a psychological need to seek expression in a medium that was itself a radical displacement of his native language. Displacement would remain a governing concept in Pagis's poetry, from the repeated and often flaunted effects of defamiliarization in his imagery, to his eerie refractions of the cataclysm that swept away European Jewry, to the global perspectives of his remarkable "evolutionary" and science-fiction poems, where time is accelerated, distorted, even reversed, and earthly existence is seen characteristically from an immense telescopic distance.

In stressing the role of Hebrew as the poet's linguistic medium of displacement, I do not mean to suggest that Pagis is estranged in any way from the language in which he writes. In fact, the revolution in Hebrew verse that he, Amichai, and Zach helped bring about was above all the perfection of a natural-sounding colloquial norm for Hebrew poetry. Perhaps it may have been easier for them to do this because as children suddenly called upon - by the inexorable pressure of their peer groups first of all - to possess a completely new linguistic competence, their primary associations were with the spoken language. Of the three, Pagis and Amichai make the most frequent efforts to incorporate elements of classical Hebrew in their predominantly colloquial diction, but in opposite ways - Amichai quite often imbedding allusive and ironically pointed bits of traditional texts in his own language, Pagis more unobtrusively modulating into locutions that recall in the Hebrew a higher literary decorum or, occasionally and somewhat distantly, a specific biblical or rabbinic text. As a poet, Pagis generally prefers contemporary vehicles and a contemporary sound, but it is also worth keeping in mind that the sixteen-year-old immigrant ignorant of Hebrew so thoroughly assimilated the rich classical tradition of the language that in his scholarly work he became the foremost living authority on the poetics of Hebrew literature in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The experience of displacement that I have proposed as a key to Pagis's poetry is felt most pervasively in the brilliant obliquity of the stances he typically assumes. Again, the contrast with Amichai, who is so often confessional, autobiographical, vividly personal, is striking. There is a submerged freight of horror in a good deal of Pagis's work, but precisely because the historical occasion for it is so enormous, the way he finds to give it compelling expression without the shrillness of hysteria or the bathos of pseudoprophetic pronouncement is to cultivate a variety of distanced, ventriloquistic voices that become authentic surrogates for his own voice. When he writes a poem called "Autobiography," it is the autobiography of an archetype, Abel, the first victim; Abel is also, among many other avatars, Dan Pagis, 1939-45:

you can die once, twice, even seven times, but you can't die a thousand times. I can. My underground cells reach everywhere.

In the poems that deal directly with genocide, this use of distanced and multiple voices is linked with an impulse to pull apart the basic categories of existence and reassemble them in strange configurations that expose the full depth of the outrage perpetrated. It is as though time and space (the affinity with the science-fiction poems is clear), man and God, self and other, body and soul, had been spun through a terrific centrifuge to be weirdly separated out, their positions disconcertingly reversed. The concluding stanza of "Testimony," to cite one of many memorable examples, extracts from its reconstitution of the cosmos an irony so comprehensive that it almost includes a note of consolation in its bitter dream of an encounter between wraithlike man and wraithlike God. The final clause of the poem turns dizzyingly on a verse from Yigdal, the medieval hymn based on Maimonides' Thirteen Principles, which declares that God "has no body [guf, rendered in the translation below as 'face'] nor the image of a body."

And he in his mercy left nothing of me that would die. And I fled to him, floated up weightless, blue, forgiving - I would even say: apologizing - smoke to omnipotent smoke that has no face or image.

Odd as it may seem at first, Pagis is also a playful poet. The operation of this playfulness is perfectly continuous with the radical displacements of his more darkly brooding poems. The apparent contradiction here is readily resolved. If displacement has been one of the basic conditions of his own existence, the decision to make that condition into poetry was a way of converting it from a fate passively suffered into an imaginative ordering actively achieved. The same poetic force that juggles ontological categories in the Holocaust poems, transforming Creator and victim alike into faceless smoke, or a fleeing refugee into "imaginary man" (in "Instructions for Crossing the Border"), is also behind the metamorphosis of armchairs and balloons into strange and wonderful animals in the delightful group of poems, "Bestiary." The oddest animal of the bestiary is, of course, that predatory biped who "alone/cooks animals, peppers them." But this oddness is only the reverse, witty side of the perception in the Holocaust poems of something radically uncanny about man - abysmally so when he puts on boots and marches people into boxcars, astonishingly so when as victim he manages, despite everything, to survive. In "Bestiary," however, the oddness of the human animal produces a kind of existential comedy:

. . . he alone laughs, rides of his own free will and, strangest of all, rides of his own free will on a motorcycle. He has four limbs, two ears, a hundred hearts.

Another relatively late poem, "Jason's Grave in Jerusalem," is a striking illustration of these metamorphic powers of imagination, of how the once-displaced person has become an artificer of suggestive displacements. Jason's tomb really exists in the midst of a prosperous residential neighborhood in Jerusalem, a city where the living and the dead are in any case mingled promiscuously through architecture, topography, and archaeological remains surrounded by urban bustle. This is one of the rare poems in which Pagis actually introduces an explicit element of the Israeli landscape; characteristically, he spins out of this Jerusalem burial chamber dug into the living rock an imaginative credenza in which land and sea, incarceration and flight, the contemporary and the archaic, life and death, myth and actuality, spiral around each other in a lovely dance.

The Hellenistic Jason of the Judean King Yannai's court blends into the legendary Jason pursuing the golden fleece. The catalyst for this and all the other transformations of the poem is the image of a ship scratched on the wall of the tomb - in effect, an emblem inscribed within the poem's imagined world of the magical property of artifice to become a vehicle of escape from the constraints of the quotidian, from what Pagis elsewhere calls "the limits of physics." The golden fleece seized by this Jason, as we learn in the last three lines, turns out to be the sheer sensuous splendor of the Mediterranean world through which the fabled hero glides. In the Hebrew, that climactic sensuousness is made palpable in the rich play of alliteration and assonance through which the concluding nine words of the poem are finely interwoven: shemesh shel mayim/meshi shel ruah/shayish shel ketzef. No translation could reproduce just that effect, but here as elsewhere, the resourcefulness and sensitivity of Stephen Mitchell's version are remarkable. For Pagis's poetry is not only wry and shrewdly colloquial (qualities more readily translatable into contemporary English), but it also on occasion delights in the texture of language and the feel of experience this texture is made to match. For that quality, too, Stephen Mitchell has fashioned eminently workable English equivalents. Thus, at the end of "Jason's Grave in Jerusalem," Pagis's antique sailor is said to smuggle, "with great profit . . . very expensive merchandise." And now those last three lines in English:

sunlight of water, velvet of sea-breeze, marble of foam.

Some English discussions of Pagis's work have tended to pigeonhole him as a "poet of the Holocaust," but in fact his imaginative landscape extends from the grim vistas of genocide to the luminous horizon of medieval Hebrew poetry in the Iberian peninsula. He is after all, the gifted expositor of Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, and the other great poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries who responded so richly to the colors and images and aesthetic values of worldly existence, who celebrated in the intricate, formal artifice of their verse the abiding power of art. Pagis's own poetry, of course, is necessarily more understated and more conversational than the medieval texts he has studied, but in its distinctively modern idiom it, too, is a self-conscious demonstration and affirmation of what the poetic imagination can do.

ROBERT ALTER is Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Hebrew and Modernity (1994) and Genesis: Translation and Commentary (1996). This essay, and the translations that follow, are excerpted from The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis, published by the University of California Press this Fall. This essay is the introduction.