Language and Poetic Style
In an interview published in the American Poetry Review, Amichai spoke about his command of Hebrew:
"I grew up in a very religious household... So the prayers, the language of prayer itself became a kind of natural language for me... I don't try—like sometimes poets do—to 'enrich' poetry by getting more cultural material or more ethnic material into it. It comes very naturally."
Robert Alter describes Amichai's poetry as a "play of sound." He "builds a strong momentum that moves in free association from word to word, the sounds virtually generating the words that follow in the syntactic chain through phonetic kinship."
Amichai's work was popular in English translation, but admirers of his poetry in the original Hebrew claim his innovative use of the language is lost in translation. Subtle layers of meaning achieved using an ancient word rather than its modern synonym to impart a biblical connotation cannot always be conveyed. In Amichai's love poem In the Middle of This Century, for instance, the English translation reads: "the linsey-woolsey of our being together." The Hebrew term, shatnez, refers to the biblical taboo on interweaving linen and wool, which a Hebrew reader would grasp as an image of forbidden union.
Read more about this topic: Yehuda Amichai
Famous quotes containing the words language and, language, poetic and/or style:
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating Low Average Ability, reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (18891945)
“The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.”
—Edward Gibbon (17371794)
“Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call history by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World history ... only comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... Ones style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)