Poems Found in Translation- Yehuda Amichai- by A. Z. Foreman

Poems Found In Translation: “Yehuda Amichai: My Father (From Hebrew)”

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Yehuda Amichai: My Father (From Hebrew)

Posted: 23 Jul 2014 02:10 PM PDT

Every generation that goes to war hopes that the next will not have to do likewise. The hope is often misplaced, as when The War to End All Wars proved to be no such thing in the face of its even more deadly and infinitely more tragic sequel. 
 
Amichai's father, with whom this poem begins, served as a German soldier in WWI. Later Amichai himself volunteered and fought in WWII with the British army as a member of the Jewish Brigade, and then served as a commando in the Negev Brigade during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, on which note the poem abruptly ends.
 
In the case of the father fighting for the Germans, the war is rightly described as "theirs." Yet for Amichai, the wars are understood as being very much his own, fighting as a Jew for his people. The year after this poem was published, Amichai would serve yet again in the Sinai War, and again after that two decades later in the Yom Kippur War.

My Father
By Yehuda Amichai
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Four years my father fought that war of theirs,
And did not love or hate his enemies.
But I know he was forming me, even there,
Day by day, out of his tranquilities

The precious few tranquilities he gleaned
Between the smoke and bombs for a child's sake
And put them in the knapsack wearing at the seams
With leftovers of mother's hardening cake.

He gathered with his eyes the nameless dead
The numerous dead, to give me something more,
So that I'd love them, seeing them through his gaze instead

Of dying, as they did, in gore and terror.
He filled his eyes with them. He was in error.
Like them I must go off to my own war.

The Original was sent with this but because of computer stuff was an illegible bunch of weird marks.