On the Attitude Toward Children in Wartime.

On the Attitude Toward Children in Wartime

   He who destroys thirty babies
   it's as if he'd destroyed three hundred babies,
   and toddlers too,
   or even eight-and-a-half-year-olds.
   In a year, God willing, they'd be soldiers
   in the Palestine Liberation Army.

   "Benighted children,
   at their age
   they don't even have a real world view.
   Anyway, their future would be shrouded, too:
   refugee shacks, unwashed faces,
   open sewers in the streets,
   infected eyes,
   a negative outlook on life."

   And thus began the flight from city to village,
   from village to burrows in the hills.
   As when a man did flee from a lion,
   as when he did flee from a bear,
   as when he did flee from a cannon,
   from an airplane, from our own troops.

   He who destroys thirty babies,
   it's as if he'd destroyed one thousand and thirty,
   or one thousand and seventy,
   thousand upon thousand.
   And for that alone shall he find
   no rest.

translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

Author's note:

This is a variation on a poem by Natan Zach that deals [satirically] with the question of whether there were exaggerations in the number of children reported killed in the [1982] Lebanon War.

Lines 1-2, He who destroys: Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5: "He who destroys a single human soul, it is as if he had destroyed an entire world."

Lines 16-17, As when a man: Amos 5:19.

Dahlia Ravikovitch (b. Ramat Gan, 1936," d. Tel Aviv, 2005) was one of Israel's great poets, perhaps the greatest Hebrew woman poet of all time. Her work has been translated into many languages, from Arabic and Chinese to Serbo-Croatian and Vietnamese. Ravikovitch was widely known for her outspoken and courageous political activism. Since the early 1980s, when she emerged as the leading poetic voice among feminist anti-war activists, her poetry explored the parallels between the plight of the Palestinians, the suffering of Jews in the Diaspora, and the constraints on women in traditional Jewish society. "On the Attitude Toward Children in Wartime" was written in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Chana Bloch is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Mrs. Dumpty, and co-translator of The Song of Songs and books by Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch. Chana Kronfeld, professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of On the Margins of Modernism.

Bloch and Kronfeld received the PEN Translation Award for their translation of Amichai's Open Closed Open and an NEA award for The Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, which will be published by Norton.