“My Biblical Period”: Dahlia Ravikovitch
Last Friday marked the tenth anniversary of the death of the great Israeli poet, Dahlia Ravikovitch 1936–2005. To celebrate her work I post some of her poems in my translation: This is the 2nd installment:
Dahlia Ravikovitch was 23 year old in 1959 when her first book The Love of An Orange came out:
Love
Two fish raced,
and went down into the depths of the sea
to tell one another
how great was their love.
*
Two fish plunged
and remained in the depths of the sea
and the farther they went
the greater became their love.
*
And they did not come to shore any more
the lovers of the depths of the sea.
The mouth grows weary from telling
how great was their love
A Picture
The green-lamb woods skittered down the slopes
and the sea below splashed and turned blue from the sun.
In the sky clouds bloomed like river lilies.
and we were still girls.
*
And one girl among us had loving eyes
and we envied her until we forgot,
and another one among us was fair and tall
and knew the answers when asked in class.
*
And I would go out in the sun to the nearby field
and loved the clouds and muse stories over them
and I had a plenty of time to reflect sadly
from the beginning of the gray autumn till the end of the yellow summer.
The Mediterranean landscape in “A Picture” is familiar to the Israeli reader, the Carmel mountains and the sea below. The poem is bright with the sun but the childhood memories of the child/woman are not happy as we can see from the following lines:
“and I had a plenty of time to reflect sadly /from the beginning of the gray autumn till the end of the yellow summer.”
The language in the Hebrew original is archaic, elevated and stylized . At that stage the young Ravikovitch preferred expressions, motives, and quotations from the Bible. The two poems are highly structured and rhymed. In an 1970 interview Ravikovitch stated: “It was my biblical period….after my first book I knew that I had to break away from my biblical language”.
Tomorrow I shall demonstrate that change in language in Ravikovitch’s later work.