MICHAL GOVRIN
625
poem, I say, "No, there is nothing more personal than a dream - of the indi–
vidual, ofa people.
During the rest of the festival, people continue to hurry from hall to
hall. Later that night the Russian poetry reading is packed full of cigarette
smoke and bodies. The poets who have come from the Soviet Union under
the new conditions of
glasnost
and those who live here - Akhmadulina, Yev–
geni Rejn, Gennadi Aigi, Savelij Grinberg, Ephraim Bauch - stand and recite
by heart. There are bursts oflaughter, ripples of understanding, applause,
sharp, alert faces.
It
feels like Leningrad, Moscow, perhaps the Yizre'el Valley
in the 1920s of the pioneer generation, whose dreams were steeped in the
Russian language they had brought with them from back there.
After the festival, I hear on my car radio that Warsaw has agreed to
become a transit point for Jews on their way from the Soviet Union to Israel.
The spokesman says that Poland has an obligation to save the Jews. No, the
Poles are not afraid; they will not give in to threats from Arab terror
organizations. It is a surrealistic encounter of two historic times, the Holocaust
and the Intifada.
On Tuesday, the German poet Christoph Meckel reads. There is a
deep vein of German in what was brought here so reverently as Culture.
The books of Heine, Rilke, Trakl, Lakser-Schuler, Nelly Sachs, and the voice
of Paul Celan on audiocassettes are passed from hand to hand like secret
signs. Jerusalem through time looks like a crazy comic strip in which flags,
conquerors, kings, messiahs, flash past in dizzying succession. Perhaps that is
why the prophetic voice was always needed here (and is Meckel's German
muse the proper angel for this?) in order to pierce through the whirl of his–
tory. The session ends with the voice of Paul Celan's last poems, written
during his visit to Jerusalem and on the Mount ofOlives.
Roberto Juarroz reads in Spanish from "Vertical Poetry":
Words also fall to the ground,
like birds suddely crazed
by their own movements,
like objects that suddenly lose their balance,
like men who trip without there existing obstacles,
like dolls alienated by their rigidity.
(tr. John Chando)
Bei Dao, with the ancient tools of Chinese poetry, digs an airshaft
through the grayness of Peking housing developments and the monumental–
ity ofTienanmen Square with lines such as: "Love: Tranquility. / The wild
geese have flown / over the virgin wasteland / the old tree has toppled with
a crash / acrid salty rain drifts through the air. ... Freedom: Torn scraps of
paper / fluttering."
