Editor's Note
Only innocents or the desperate can speak as directly to the root of things as Avraham Chalfi does. In these elegiac poems, images are vehicles of the mythic.
Joseph Campbell wrote, “Mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words.” Despite their quotidian vocabulary and human motifs Chalfi’s poems’ unadorned truths seem primal, their appeal enduring in lucid translation.
— Mandakini Pachauri
The Bombay Literary Magazine
The head of an imaginary bird
The head of an imaginary bird
Between a wasted body
And a distant dream
That will not ever be called anything but a distant dream.
How many nations reside in its mists
Of ruddy clouds
As if drawn by the small hand of a sickly child?
In one of them I left my name.
And it calls me tonight
From the depths.
Your Brow Is Bound with Darkest Ore
Your brow is bound with darkest ore
(I do not recall if they wrote so in song.)
Your brow is a rhyme for eyes and glow.
(I do not recall if they rhymed so in song.)
But whoever you go to–
His life is filled with song.
Your lilac robe so woolly and soft
That you wrap yourself up with every night,
I wouldn’t have wished to be your confidant,
Nor a monk praying up to the form of a sprite
Seeing desperate dreams of a form so divine –
When before him you are woman.
You love to be sad and quiet,
Hear some tale about near, about far
And I who oft look at you silent,
Without stir or word
Forget everyone else in the room.
My soul lives between the walls of your house
And captive between your walls takes leave of me
While I in my body take my leave of you.
My dream is spread like a rug at your feet.
Take, love, your steps over its flowers.
Wear your robe so soft toward twilight
In a little while I’ll come to your gate.
And your brow
That is bound with darkest ore
Will be close to my lips as the rhyme to the song.
Then I’ll breathe in your ears until the dawn
Until sun
As if stoned
Your brow is bound with darkest ore.
Happy Snow
Soft words
Feline as a rub against the soul
Fall from the words of those in love
With some girl
And the whole earth entire – so they fancy to themselves
Dreams their own dream.
What a blue-eyed land
And how it pierces them with darts of ardour
Like in those good years.
Don’t take it lightly, don’t take it light
And don’t harden your heart
Happy snow falls in the heart
And who should say not
And words so soft
And feline
How should they not fall from the lips of those who love
As described above.
Darkness Has a Face
Darkness has a face –
It’s the ash of a moon demons extinguished.
It’s the black bubble of unrest,
A circle to stifle in the corners of a square.
Creation dreams in chains,
Its whole reflection bound in a diamond’s teardrop
By the light of its eye
Hanging over the dark
Your thoughts weave a sestina.
Man after man, with his night and his deeds.
As if each heart shut forever, door and window.
I’ll sit, keep still, or doze on the stoop
Of the house of a mother
Fearful over a child’s cradle.
There’s a man who speaks his song softly
There’s a man who speaks his song softly
Between window and walls, a square door.
His strait narrow as a prison
But his mind wide as all outdoors.
An ancient lizard suddenly caught him.
It has two faces: fierce death or weary aged night.
But the man encrusted in its cobwebs
Already knows all that.
There’s a man whose chamber is in chaos,
Between his body and his brooding and infinity,
And many words without joy and grief.
But the firmament above him is so high –
Its river cuddles every single thing.
There’s a man who speaks his song so soft.
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Salvador Dali. Le Sommeil (Sleep), 1937. Oil painting. 51×78 cm.
Perhaps the more one says about a Dali painting, the less it becomes related to the mind’s hidden secrets. About this painting, Dali remarked that “the act of sleeping is a monster sustained on the crutches of reality.” However, perhaps it is Reality who is the differently-abled somnambulist. Whatever the thoughts this painting may evoke or provoke, we felt that it matched Chalfi’s poems with their bird-like heads stretching between wasted bodies and distant dreams.
Author | AVRAHAM CHALFI
AVRAHAM CHALFI (1904-1980) was born in Łódź, Poland. His schooling was at a Russian school in Ukraine, where he developed a lifelong interest in theatre. At 20, he emigrated to Israel and worked as a manual labourer. He participated in the just started worker’s theatre, Ohel. His first of poems were published in 1933, followed by eight subsequent volumes. Described by his translator Atar Hadari as a “character actor, a clown, a dandy, and a man about town” whose poetry was “entirely out of step with the Israeli poetic culture of his time.” However, when the celebrated Israeli singer Arik Einstein set Chalfi’s poems to music, success waylaid the poet’s plans for a modestly colourful obscurity. The conversion of lyric to lyrics made Chalfi a touchstone of the country’s culture. Hummed, whistled, karaoke’d and piped into elevators, Chalfi’s poems, suffused with mystical yearning and anxiety, were quickly domesticated into the pleasure economy of capitalism.
In some circles, Chalfi is remembered much more as an actor’s actor than a poet. This is one reason we’ve used an image of his titular role from Dan Holman’s movie Floch (1972). A poet who became a songwriter who was an actor famed for the masks he could reify. We suspect he would have resented this trite ergo sum.
Translator | ATAR HADARI
ATAR HADARI is the author of Rembrandt’s Bible and Gethsemane (Shearsman). He is also the translator of Songs from Bialik (Syracuse University Press) and the Pen Translates award winning Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems of Hanoch Levin (Arc Publications). He also translates Hebrew novels, among them Badulina by Gabi Nitzan and Key Witness by Liad Shoham.