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, poetic and/or style:
“Its not that we want the political jobs themselves ... but they seem to be the only language the men understand. We dont really want these $200 a year jobs. But the average man doesnt understand working for a cause.”
—Jennie Carolyn Van Ness (b. c. 1890?)
“There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (18601904)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenicealthough, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (18091849)