Two Poems by Amir Gilboa: “Under Siege” and “By the Rivers of Babylon”
I thoroughly enjoyed the "Modern Hebrew Poetry as Midrash" class I took this fall semester. Thank you to Rabbi Dan Shevitz and Rabbi Adam Rosenthal for help with translation and research.
Amir Gilboa was born as Berl Feldmann in Ukraine in 1917 and died in Israel in 1984. in 1982, he was awarded the Israel Prize for literature. He immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1937 and during World War II fought in the Jewish Brigade of the British. Like many who came to Mandate Palestine or later Israel, Berl Feldmann Hebraicized his name. Amir Gilboa is an interesting name to choose, quite a statement. אמיר means treetop, the crown of the tree, or the summit of a mountain. The particular mountain in his name is Mount Gilboa, famously the place where King Saul died in battle together with his sons, a mountain condemned by King David and his eulogy in 2 Samuel 1:21.
הָרֵי בַגִּלְבֹּעַ אַל־טַל וְאַל־מָטָר עֲלֵיכֶם וּשְׂדֵי תְרוּמֹת כִּי שָׁם נִגְעַל מָגֵן גִּבּוֹרִים מָגֵן שָׁאוּל בְּלִי מָשִׁיחַ בַּשָּׁמֶן׃
O hills of Gilboa—
Let there be no dew or rain on you,
Or bountiful fields.
For there the shield of warriors lay rejected,
The shield of Saul,
Polished with oil no more.
What is the nature of the relationship with Jewish religion and the Jewish God of someone whose chosen name is a direct reference to a significant and tragic moment and place in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish narrative? Haim O. Rechnitzer[1] quotes the literary critic Hillel Barzel, who asserts that “despite the fact that Gilboa’s poetry is anthropocentric at its core and that Gilboa defined himself as a secular poet, his poetry displays an intimate dialogue with God, the Bible and later Jewish sources.”
Gilboa’s poems are filled with biblical characters who are very talkative, and dialogue, or at least direct speech and inner monologues of the characters or the poet-persona, certainly abounds in the poems we looked at in class. Arguably those dialogues or soliloquies represent an attempt to bring God into the picture, yet they generally leave God passive and silent. While not entirely absent, God feels more like an afterthought, a disenchantment, without any specific agency in interfering with the characters’ lives. Rather than reaching for the divine, Gilboa cuts the bonds with the divine and seems more interested in giving voice to the human characters. He tends to put them into unexpected situations and transports biblical figures into a modern, often secular setting. (Rahav, And My Brother Is Silent). The poet-persona, whether as a “lyrical I” or an anonymous narrator, directly calls out to those biblical characters as if trying to reach them through the millennia: Abba, Abba! (Isaac), Rahav! Moshe, Moshe! Shaul, Shaul! Jeremiah, Jeremiah!). At the same time, the poet-persona highlights his inability to communicate in earnest with these characters or to change the course of events. Such a poet-persona is not a bearer of divinely inspired messages. If anything, through his inability, he reveals God’s inertia. Which makes sense, because in a world where God plays no role, what role would a poet-prophet of God play?
In that, Gilboa’s poetry distinguishes itself from other Hebrew poems, where the poet-persona often deliberately takes on a clear prophetic stance or aims to reach a union with the divine. In Gilboa’s oeuvre, the poet dafka breaks away from an intimate relation with God[2] and appears more like a moderator of events, not unlike a documentary filmmaker walking through the landscape merely describing what he sees, addressing people from a bygone era but not receiving an answer. As Haim Rechnitzer has observed:
“Gilboa’s ungrammaticalities increase the sense of fragmentized thoughts and kaleidoscopic associations, further shattering a reader’s train of thought and circumventing habitual linear understanding. It seems that Gilboa’s use of language reflects a different understanding of what the poet’s role is.”
Many of Gilboa’s poems are marked by a dreamlike, surreal, or absurd quality and are characterized by a push and pull between a traditional biblical setting on the one hand and a modern, nonchalant irreverence on the other hand. Inserted into that traditional religious frame, we encounter colloquialisms as well as pop-culture figures, causing ambiguities and sudden breaks in the consistency of both thematic and linguistic registers.
Generally, the tone of voice in the poems feels tachlis and lively, as if conversing alternatively with the reader or another persona in the poem. (And My Brother Is Silent, Moshe, Shaul.) More than once in the poems selected for our class, a child is the “lyrical I” (Isaac, Moshe, and By the Rivers of Babylon) or children appear as characters (Rahav, Under Siege), in varying degrees of agency. As Robert Alter remarks, “Gilboa in fact uses the child as persona in a number of remarkable poems in which biblical figures are appropriated for contemporary purposes.”[3]
For the class presentation and final paper, I have chosen two poems we did not look at in class: במצור, Under Siege, and על נהרות בבל, By the Rivers of Babylon.
Both poems display many of the abovementioned characteristics, particularly what I have called a break of consistency in linguistic and thematic registers. For example, in Under Siege, we encounter Little Dahlia, who was a character from Israeli children’s books in the 1960s, a girl’s version of the French Tin-Tin: a girl traveling around the world, into space, solving problems. In this poem however, we will see that her presence only adds to the brutal, absurd senselessness permeating the scene.
במצור
Under Siege
Every man against his fellow
and wall after wall collapses
Little Dahlia is running around
She is all alone
but she does not cry
Who is that, screaming
against the sun?
Whoa! He has no more eyes
drilled into their holes
Jeremiah, Jeremiah!
Take what I have left
The pistol
and a little bullet
in the heart of Nevuchadrezzar
in our God… Praised be!
(my translation)
The poem opens with a direct quote from Zacharia 14:13, describing the coming of the “Day of the Lord,” an apocalyptic-messianic event separating the good from the bad in a final gathering of the nations in Jerusalem.[4]
וְהָיָה בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא תִּהְיֶה מְהוּמַת־יְהֹוָה רַבָּה בָּהֶם וְהֶחֱזִיקוּ אִישׁ יַד רֵעֵהוּ וְעָלְתָה יָדוֹ עַל־יַד רֵעֵהוּ׃
In that day, a great panic from GOD shall fall upon them, and everyone shall snatch at the hand of another, and everyone shall raise their hand against everyone else’s hand.
Robert Alter translates this verse as: “…and every man shall seize his fellow, and his hand shall be raised against his fellow[5].” Every man is for himself and turns against his fellow.[6]
In a move that calls to mind Rechnitzer’s description of “Gilboa’s Jewish textual foundation as broken to its most elemental and wild elements”[7], the poet combines this apocalyptic-messianic day of panic and S.O.S emergency with another day of existential destruction happening in Jerusalem, a day that has already happened and that is recorded, most notably, in the Book of Jeremiah and 2 Kings: The destruction of Jerusalem and the first Temple through the Babylonian troops – merging a redemptive event with its antidote of expulsion and exile, which can be read as an insurgent[8] if not apostatic or heretic statement in itself: There is nothing redemptive in redemption, rather the Day of the Lord is a big showdown, the ultimate duel at high noon between man and God.[9]
Here are the verses from Jeremiah that are echoed in the poem:
Jeremiah 32:1
הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר־הָיָה אֶל־יִרְמְיָהוּ מֵאֵת יְהֹוָה [בַּשָּׁנָה] הָעֲשִׂרִית לְצִדְקִיָּהוּ מֶלֶךְ יְהוּדָה הִיא הַשָּׁנָה שְׁמֹנֶה־עֶשְׂרֵה שָׁנָה לִנְבוּכַדְרֶאצַּר׃
The word that came to Jeremiah from GOD in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nevuchadrezzar. (an alternative for Nebuchadnezzar)
Jeremiah 39:1
בַּשָּׁנָה הַתְּשִׁעִית לְצִדְקִיָּהוּ מֶלֶךְ־יְהוּדָה בַּחֹדֶשׁ הָעֲשִׂרִי בָּא נְבוּכַדְרֶאצַּר מֶלֶךְ־בָּבֶל וְכׇל־חֵילוֹ אֶל־יְרוּשָׁלַ͏ִם וַיָּצֻרוּ עָלֶיהָ׃
In the ninth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, in the tenth month, King Nevuchadrezzar of Babylon moved against Jerusalem with his whole army, and they laid siege to it.
Jeremiah 32:2
וְאָז חֵיל מֶלֶךְ בָּבֶל צָרִים עַל־יְרוּשָׁלָ͏ִם וְיִרְמְיָהוּ הַנָּבִיא הָיָה כָלוּא בַּחֲצַר הַמַּטָּרָה אֲשֶׁר בֵּית־מֶלֶךְ יְהוּדָה׃
At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the prison compound attached to the palace of the king of Judah.
Having provided the biblical-historical-prophetic background, the poem now focuses on the total collapse of layers after layers of structure: “And wall after wall collapses” – compare this to Jeremiah 39:2:
בְּעַשְׁתֵּי־עֶשְׂרֵה שָׁנָה לְצִדְקִיָּהוּ בַּחֹדֶשׁ הָרְבִיעִי בְּתִשְׁעָה לַחֹדֶשׁ הׇבְקְעָה הָעִיר׃
And in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, on the ninth day of the fourth month, the [walls of] the city were breached.
In the biblical text, “walls” are only alluded to in the Hebrew and mentioned in the English translation. In his poem, Gilboa uses the word קיר, which comes up in Tanakh only once:
Joshua 2:15:
וַתּוֹרִדֵם בַּחֶבֶל בְּעַד הַחַלּוֹן כִּי בֵיתָהּ בְּקִיר הַחוֹמָה וּבַחוֹמָה הִיא יוֹשָׁבֶת׃
She (Rahav) let them down by a rope through the window—for her dwelling was at the outer side of the city wall and she lived in the actual wall.
קיר here is translated as the outer side of Jericho’s city wall. In modern usage, it usually denotes the wall inside a house or an apartment. Gilboa’s description of Jerusalem’s walls tumbling down sound way more apocalyptic than the verse in Joshua 6:20 about what might be the most emblematic scene of collapsing walls ever:
כִשְׁמֹעַ הָעָם אֶת־קוֹל הַשּׁוֹפָר וַיָּרִיעוּ הָעָם תְּרוּעָה גְדוֹלָה וַתִּפֹּל הַחוֹמָה תַּחְתֶּיהָ
When the troops heard the sound of the horns, they raised a mighty shout, and the wall collapsed. (under itself)
Here is Gilboa’s version of tumbling walls, using מתמוטט instead of תפול.
יד איש ברעהו
קיר אחר קיר מתמוטט
Every man against his fellow
And wall after wall collapses
The verb mitmotet [10] is found in several psalms[11] describing the devastating shattering of the foundations of the earth or the firmament. In modern Hebrew, it can also refer to mental derangement and emotional upheaval. Thus, in Gilboa’s landscape, it is not only one wall of a city that comes tumbling down like the wall of Jericho or the walls of Jerusalem, rather both the orders of society and the cosmos are dismantled and in shambles, layer after layer, wall after wall.
Amidst this chaos of slaughter and collapsing walls, Little Dahlia, the precocious children’s book character, is running around, not seen, not belonging to the scene, seemingly unfazed, like a useless confused time-traveler, adding to the absurdity of this apocalyptic scene. I have translated “ein ish ima” as “she is all alone”, and I believe this is ultimately the essence of the line. However, the phrase sounds very tanakhi, and a quick search brought several verses from Tanakh (and Gemara) that mirrored it. For example, Genesis 3:6, Deuteronomy 22:23, and Judges 13:9.
Genesis 3:6
וַתֵּרֶא הָאִשָּׁה כִּי טוֹב הָעֵץ לְמַאֲכָל וְכִי תַאֲוָה־הוּא לָעֵינַיִם וְנֶחְמָד הָעֵץ לְהַשְׂכִּיל וַתִּקַּח מִפִּרְיוֹ וַתֹּאכַל וַתִּתֵּן גַּם־לְאִישָׁהּ עִמָּהּ וַיֹּאכַל׃
When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband, (who was with her) and he ate.
Deuteronomy 22:23
כִּי יִהְיֶה נַעֲרָ בְתוּלָה מְאֹרָשָׂה לְאִישׁ וּמְצָאָהּ אִישׁ בָּעִיר וְשָׁכַב עִמָּהּ׃
In the case of a virgin who is engaged to someone —if another man comes upon her in town and lies with her, (…)
Judges 13:9
וַיִּשְׁמַע הָאֱלֹהִים בְּקוֹל מָנוֹחַ וַיָּבֹא מַלְאַךְ הָאֱלֹהִים עוֹד אֶל־הָאִשָּׁה וְהִיא יוֹשֶׁבֶת בַּשָּׂדֶה וּמָנוֹחַ אִישָׁהּ אֵין עִמָּהּ׃
God heeded Manoah’s plea, and the angel of God came to the woman again. She was sitting in the field and her husband Manoah was not with her.
In these and other examples, “a man with a woman” connotes marriage or illicit/forced sex. Maybe we can understand that Dahlia is, despite the chaos of the day, not threatened by any male attack. However, I don’t think that we need to read a sexual context into the line referring to Little Dahlia for the overall understanding of the poem.
Moving on, the narrative perspective then shifts to a short inner monologue or soliloquy, which might be Little Dahlia’s voice or the perspective of an omniscient third person narrator: “Who is this, screaming against the sun?” This question redirects the attention of the reader to this person, King Zedekiah, standing against the sun, screaming in pain for he has just seen his sons being slaughtered and afterwards his own eyes have been “put out” by the Babylonians.
2 Kings 25:7
וְאֶת־בְּנֵי֙ צִדְקִיָּ֔הוּ שָׁחֲט֖וּ לְעֵינָ֑יו וְאֶת־עֵינֵ֤י צִדְקִיָּ֙הוּ֙ עִוֵּ֔ר וַיַּאַסְרֵ֙הוּ֙ בַּֽנְחֻשְׁתַּ֔יִם וַיְבִאֵ֖הוּ בָּבֶֽל׃ {ס}
They slaughtered Zedekiah’s sons before his eyes; then Zedekiah’s eyes were put out. He was chained in bronze fetters and he was brought to Babylon.
The word “Ahoi” used by Gilboa is an exclamation of horrified astonishment, maybe like “My oh my,” or “Whoa,” and sounds like a rather old-fashioned expression that denotes and introduces an intense observation, a direct commentary. Maybe even a word Little Dahlia would use. In any event, the observation is in fact intense as it describes the gaping empty holes in Zedekiah’s face, where his eyes were. The Hebrew “iver” suggests blindness, and the English “put out” does not exactly describe what happened. Gilboa here offers two possible explanations for what might have been done to Zedekiah, the first one being the more common one, suggesting that the Judean king was blinded. This would be underscored by the image of the sun, representing a blinding device. However, having no more eyes “drilled into their holes” would indicate that they had been in fact gouged out.
Now, the narration shifts again, this time to a direct speech: “Jeremiah Jeremiah!!” Who is screaming here? Is it Little Dahlia? Maybe. But more likely, it is Zedekiah, screaming now to the prophet: “Take what I have left!”
Some background is called for here: Jeremiah chapter 38 recounts an encounter between Jeremiah and Zedekiah prior to the events described in the poem. There, the prophet urges the king to surrender and trust in God. But the king not only cannot do that, he also does not want his entourage to know that he sought advice from Jeremiah, a man despised, tortured, and imprisoned because of his doomsday prophecies. Yet instead of following the prophet’s advice, Zedekiah cowardly flees into the desert, where he is caught by the Babylonians.
It is possible to imagine that now, Zedekiah regrets not having listened to Jeremiah and turns to the rejected prophet[12], again in despair yet again unable to act by himself. Having already lost his sons and his eyesight, a pistol[13] is all that he has left. But he cannot point the pistol himself. He cannot shoot whoever he wants to shoot, with that “little bullet.”
And these lines lead to another ambiguity in the poem, caused by what Rechnitzer calls “ambiguous syntax”. It is unclear who, if anyone, is shot: the Babylonian king in the heart -- or God.
What does the word “yishtabach” refer to[14]? Is it the bullet in Nevuchadrezzar’s heart that is praised, or God? Or is it praiseworthy that God is shot? Grammatically, it is not impossible that it is God who is being shot at. And while Rechnitzer contends that
“Gilboa is not an atheist or an agnostic. His God has never ceased to exist, or to borrow from Nietzsche, has never died or been murdered. God, although always present, has been deliberately marginalized”[15]
- maybe in this poem, God is indeed murdered after all, or there is an attempt to murder God, on that surreal, terrible, apocalyptic-messianic day, where revenge offers not a hint of consolation, by a coward king through the hands of a prophet of God.
This scenario could fit within the utter disintegration of every norm, system, and structure, the complete collapse of any order, the shattering of the earth and its firmaments. In this poem, it is not only Jerusalem[16] that is under siege. The human and cosmic order is besieged and, if not shot dead, God is useless as a redemptive presence, unable to step up and interfere. “Praised be” sounds like a cynical, last utterance: There is nothing and no one to be praised. As I stated above, there is nothing redemptive in the awaited redemption.
The second poem I will look at continues this historic biblical narrative, as it is set by the rivers of Babylon, in exile following the destruction of the first Temple.
על נהרות בבל
By the Rivers of Babylon[17]
There on the willows, we hung our harps. That is, the grown-ups did.
As for me, I had a small harp, and I hid it under my sleeve.
On the far side of the river, the victors kindled bonfires,
and wild with joy they roamed around them.
The evening fell and fell. And the grown-ups sat and cried. And that big fire over there.
The guards in charge of us were not among the dancers.
They cursed us, raging with impatience.
Stuttering, they mocked our language.
The grownups heard them and starred at their harps. The rivers filled with tears.
As for me, out of sorrow I dared cry out:
Who speaks gibberish here, savages, how dare you mock our language?
There is no language like ours for color and sound, for depth and distance.
And they laughed disheveled, their jaws gaping, and after me they came chasing,
entangled in the darkness.
And I would stop briefly and pluck my harp,
and they would swell like windbags, blazing like copper
(my translation)
In my remarks on this poem, I will focus on the general reception of Gilboa’s poetry, rather than analyzing the poem line by line and dissecting it for Biblical references. It is obvious that the poem is, to use Robert Alter’s words, “a radical reworking of Psalm 137, reassembling principal elements of the psalm—the sitting and weeping by the waters, the hanging up of harps on the willows, the mockery of the captors.”[18] Further, it is a good example for Amir Gilboa’s poet-persona presenting himself as a child, a haunted yet defiant boy, who positions himself between the despair of the grown-ups and the hatred of the oppressors, still plucking away, if in sorrow and fear, on his little harp that he has not surrendered, not hung on the willows. This child still holds on to the possibility to sing songs of Zion, in the most poetic language of exile that he knows: his native Hebrew. Robert Alter paints a more somber picture of the child’s resilience:
“Here too we have a mix of different registers, a wavering of the language between a child's speech and formal poetic diction that helps create this bridge, as do the rapid shifts in verb tenses, which move from past to present to an imperfect that is a virtual present. What finally drives the child, as the poet's surrogate, to distraction, is the enemy's vilification of his language, which seems to him a very precious thing, a unique reservoir of expressiveness. In the face of brutal historical disaster, the poet has only the resources of his art to cling to, but in the end, these may amount to no more than the pathetic plucking of harp strings by a frail figure resting for a moment in desperate flight.”[19]
Gilboa’s work, like that of many other Israeli poets of his generation and adjacent generations, has been interpreted as a reaction to and discussion of the Holocaust. Alter mentions how this poem, By the Rivers of Babylon, has in the past been read as a vivid image of the predicament of “the bereaved poet in a world of holocausts.”[20] Gilboa’s entire immediate family was murdered by the Nazis; and, as Alter concedes[21], “understandably, his Hebrew poems through the late 40's and 50's reflect considerable preoccupation with the Holocaust, though they remain distinctly personal poems, and he has never attempted a sustained poetic work on the subject.”
Alter wrote these lines in 1973, when the events of the Shoa were much closer in time and more acutely present in people’s memories than today. In fact, at all times, poetry has been understood as the medium of choice to express reactions to events of national scope, calamity or triumph[22]. The unprecedented dimension of the Shoa as well as the formation of a new Jewish society in the State of Israel may explain why Hebrew poetry in those decades was expected to primarily deal with the trauma of genocide and evil or with the building of the new state. The poet was considered the representative of his society, rather than an individual exploring his or her own experience and trying to forge new paths ahead for their poetic voice.
It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss these currents in depth, but it is important to note that both Robert Alter and Haim Rechnitzer caution against the easy appropriation of Israeli poets of those generations as generic spokespersons for a nation’s collective sensitivities. For one, a poetic response to horrors of the scale of the Shoa might not even be possible. Second, subsuming a poet’s inner universe as somehow being in the service of a national cause does the poet injustice. The poet is more than his national background, even if personal tragedies overlap with those of a larger group. Ultimately, it is the poet-persona inside the poems themselves that should be the focus of reception and interpretation, largely detached from anecdotal pieces of biographical information. [23] In discussing a different Gilboa poem, Rechnitzer takes a clear stand against the temptation to read the poet’s work while “projecting a historical context” on it: “I deeply disagree with this inclination, which, in my eyes, is an unnecessary reduction of the existential, philosophical, and theological themes of the poets (…) to personal biography.”[24]
I agree with Rechnitzer that the poet-persona must be seen as different and independent from the poet writing the poem. Too often do readers assume that every line in any given poem refers verbatim to a biographic experience of the author. That is obviously not the case, particularly not in lyrical poetry, which is different from spoken word performances that often strive to be understood as political and societal commentaries and therefore intentionally lack mystery and ambiguity. However, is it too far-fetched to expect to find traces of the man Berl Feldmann and his Holocaust experience in the poems of Amir Gilboa? Or a skeptical new Israeli Amir Gilboa, who chooses to write, in the first decade of state-building, poems about destruction, the loss of Jerusalem, and exile?[25] I don’t think so. Despite their independence, any poet-persona will always be informed to some degree by the biography of his or her creator. In By the Rivers of Babylon, as in other Gilboa poems we looked at in class, we encounter a speaker whose syntax is sometimes incomplete, whose grammar often ambiguous, whose incomplete sentences seem to dissipate, maybe unheard and definitely unanswered, into a void. I believe this is an artistic rendering of a traumatic experience. It doesn’t make a poem about the Holocaust or the War of Independence, but it mirrors fragmentation and brokenness and may be read as a “frail” attempt to cling to language[26] as to a little harp, as an instrument for defense in a hostile, Godless world, for the sake of continued creation and life.
[1] Haim O. Rechnitzer: Ars Prophetica, Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Israeli Poets: Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi, HUC Press 2023, page 104
[2] Many of my observations on this page are either inspired or supported by Rechnitzer’s entire chapter on Gilboa, namely pages 104-107 as well as his discussion on the poem “Birth” and ensuing pages
[3] Robert Alter https://www.commentary.org/articles/robert-alter-2/a-poet-of-the-holocaust/
[4][4] Zechariah 14 is the haftarah read on Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot
[5] Robert Alter: The Hebrew Bible, W.W. Norton, 2019, Volume 2, page 1383
[6] See also Rashi on this: והחזיקו איש יד רעהו. יאחז בו להרגו:
[7] Rechnitzer, page 106
[8] Compare Rechnitzer who calls his chapter on Gilboa “The Insurgency of the Poet.”
[9] Rechnitzer, page 125: “the total failure of the option of redemption and deliverance.”
[10] There’s a glitch in the Word doc that sometimes messes up the formatting when I add Hebrew words, so in order to avoid that I am using transliterations when necessary.
[11] For example, Psalm 82:5, or in rabbinic midrashim and commentary particularly regarding the Tower of Babylon: Rashi on Genesis 11:1: וּדְבָרִים אֲחָדִים – אָמְרוּ אַחַת לְאֶלֶף ותרנ"ו שָׁנִים הָרָקִיעַ מִתְמוֹטֵט כְּשֵׁם שֶׁעָשָׂה בִּימֵי הַמַּבּוּל, בֹּאוּ וְנַעֲשֶׂה לוֹ סְמִיכוֹת (ב"ר):
[12] Who was imprisoned until the day the Babylonians captured Jerusalem, Jeremiah 38:28
[13] Evidently not a device available in 586 BCE, further upending timelines and registers
[14] Ekdach and yishtabach are the only full rhymes in this poem, thus linking the weapon and the praise
[15] Rechnitzer, page 142
[16] It is noteworthy that Jerusalem is never mentioned by name.
[17] This translation is informed by choices Warren Bargad and Robert Alter made respectively, as quoted in Saperstein, Marc and Nancy E. Berg: Exile and the Jews: Literature, History, and Identity. Jewish Publication Society, 2024, page 25/26 (Alter) and the note to page 25: “Cf. Bargad’s translation: Who is the stutterer here, / Wild animals, and how do you [dare to] stutter?” The poet plays upon three associated Hebrew roots: ‘alag (stutter), la’ag (mock), and lahag (talk nonsense, gibberish). Bargad, “To Write the Lips of Sleepers,” 144.” (page 240)
[18] https://www.commentary.org/articles/robert-alter-2/a-poet-of-the-holocaust/
[19] Ebenda
[20] Ebenda
[21] Ebenda
[22] For example, the Jewish tradition has Eicha/Lamentations, the poetic response to the destruction of the first Temple, other nations have epics like the Odyssey (Ancient Greece), the Lusíadas (Portugal), or Beowulf (England).
[23] Rechnitzer, page 14
[24] Rechnitzer, page 125
[25] Per our class discussion on December 3rd, 2024
[26] See Rechnitzer, pages 142-143 about humans imitating the divine act of creation through language.