Love poems: A bilingual edition: Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai is commonly regarded as Israel's leading poet and one of the major poets of our time. The hallmark of his work is an extraordinary terseness-thought and feeling communi- cated with a conciseness that cuts to the bone of experience. His tone is colloquial, even casual; a man talking in his natural voice, communicating directly with the reader without the stances and masks we associate with much contemporary poetry. His com- plexities are the honest and unforced ones of a writer who has stripped his responses to life to essential words and images: telegrams of the spirit that radiate and resonate.

Amichai's terseness is particularly effective and affecting in his love poems, where strong emotion and deep memory are proved, as it were, by the laconic forms in which they are cast. The result is love poems that seem to have gone through the fire: durable and pure. Passionate, ironic, tender, meditative, they carry Amichai's unique signature. Selected from his six previous collections, they highlight a fascinating side of his life and work.

The lapidary quality of Amichai's Love Poems is even more marked in the original Hebrew, a language of great concentration on the one hand, and great range on the other: a highly inflected language in which the archaic and the modern, the biblical and the secular produce natural levels and resonances of meaning. When, for example, Amichai writes, "Long ago Hebrew used to be/ God's slang in those streets. / Now I use it to speak / holy words of passion," his Hebrew is like a message transmitted across the millennia of Jewish expressiveness.

The publication of Amichai's Love Poems in a bilingual edition is thus an important literary event as well as a rich and moving account of a man's amatory experience and memories.