Jason Mashak on Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch

Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, trans. Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfeld, W.W. Norton

Dahlia Ravikovitch’s more than a half dozen books, released between 1959 and 2006, together in one volume, are not only rich with imagery, but serve also to liberate her audience from complacency in regard to social injustice. Her poems enlighten readers about major ongoing social issues (e.g., the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, poor attempts at parenting, or depression), but in a way that is far more journalistic than didactic.

Intentional or not, the title Hovering at a Low Altitude evokes the English idiom “flying under the radar,” a metaphor for living one’s life against the grain. Ravikovitch (1936–2005) clearly witnessed the aftershock of the Holocaust, and so her stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alone is enough to understand how, for a Jewish poet living in Israel, she might be among the minority for her almost prophet-like admonition of atrocities committed by her own countrymen in the years that followed. Ravikovitch’s first two books, which read like poetic rabbinical responses, would not seem out of place in the Old Testament, somewhere between Psalms and Ezekiel, two books that provided her early inspiration.

In one of Ravikovitch’s more complex highlights, “A Jewish Portrait” (from her 1987 book True Love), the raw delicacy with which she uses to describe another person seems also to be a self-portrait, and the translators’ footnotes explain that the original Hebrew contains ambiguity that allows the image to be interpreted as that of either a Diaspora Jew or a Palestinian refugee. In “Adloyada in Manhattan,” she writes, “and the Arabs wanted to throw us into the sea / as usual / and we took away their land / as usual,” maintaining an objective view of a conflict that has ravished her homeland for far too long.

In her work, a sort of biblical-style repetition combines with lyrical sensibility, prophesy, and erotically charged images that can at times remind one of Leonard Cohen’s work. Consider the implications of the final stanza of “And Sympathy is All We Need, My Friend” (1987):

Everyone’s thirsty for love
and whoever won’t pour a glass of water for the thirsty
is doomed to gag on his own spit
to the end of his days.

God is love, after all, and Ravikovitch’s is a verdant world, where “There’s a god hiding behind the rain,” and love and desire are often represented in relation to water. Yet, the freedom that comes from sailing into such an ocean of potentiality comes with a price, as these few lines from the title poem in her posthumous (2006) book Many Waters suggest:

The bread grows stale.
A plague erupts inside her.
The sail is torn.
Fresh water’s gone.
Maybe a native canoe will come
bearing maize
or something to chew on[…]
She’s gone astray.
This ship
is the Dahlia Maria.

The title of the poem (and book) references lines in both Psalms and Song of Songs, the latter suggesting the poem’s allusion to love. Though adept in her biblical imagery and character studies, Ravikovitch’s poetic strength tends to manifest in her own experiences and observations. She returns often to a landscape of ships/sea/fields/birds/fire/wind, and her own experiences are more evident when she starts to describe more than her own homeland. When she portrays Hong Kong, Australia, Chad, Cameroon, etc., and mentions topics well known to Czechs (marionettes and a character from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which debuted in Prague), she seems attuned to more complex patterns in the world.

Ravikovitch’s battles with depression are evident in such poems as “The Beginning of Silence,” where she uses verbs from one of Ezekiel’s visions to describe ‘silence’ moving across objects in the room, finally to envelop both land and sea. Eventually, she notes “the silence shrieks inside me / and I shriek inside it,” and the reader may wonder if her bouts of depression could have been caused in part by obsessive-compulsive tendencies, as lines from “Poem in the Arab Style, Perhaps” seem to indicate:

Even the smallest thread on the floor can rob me of rest.
No way to maintain a sense of order.
[…] the defects are right there before you,
and that’s what disturbs the eye,
dispels any rest.

Translators Bloch and Kronfeld, both Hebrew scholars, extensively footnote, providing a rare and interesting glimpse into the complexities of translation in general, as well as a tangential study of both ancient and modern Hebrew culture and linguistic transformation that often grants countless layers of depth to Ravikovitch’s work. As well, they inform readers of Ravikovitch’s (sometimes subtle) references to other poets she admired, such as Leah Goldberg, Yona Wallach, and Chaim Nachman Bialik. Remarkably, Dahlia Ravikovitch seems to have envisaged a greater overall literary window for her work – timeless (without ephemeralities) – than many other poets of her century, and this is precisely why her work will continue to resonate long after any particulars that she wrote about are gone.

Steinesque or Gertrudish: Jason Mashak reviews Caroline DuBois’ You are the Business

You are the Business, Caroline DuBois, trans. Cole Swensen, Burning Deck

French poet Caroline Dubois reaches beyond contemporary poetics in her book You Are the Business (translated to English by Cole Swensen) with a refreshing reinterpretation of Steinesque (Gertrudish?) repetition, yet it is more organically fused to analytical obsessions with inner dialogues than anything Stein created. In short, if Stein applied painterly strokes with her words, then Dubois mixes the colours with her own. Dubois has a remarkable ability to observe human mental activity through her writing, but such can also be, at times, a dampener on an otherwise enjoyable reading experience. Nonetheless, her repetitions provide a key aid to fully understanding the layers of her work as repetition helps the reader to reread and thus to understand.

The book in seven sections contains untitled poems in a form not unlike square onions, in that each poem’s one to three stanzas, block-justified, represent a linguistic perception of thought, first read as the thoughts themselves, and next as another layer (or several layers) contemplating the first. Each square onion is thus a series of thoughts combined into a particular moment of awareness—a revelation that leads to further wonder. Consider:

Out of my mouth – being she – the words don’t
often come out in the form of speech but when
they come out to say something they almost always
do it several times in a row. For example when I
say listen mamma mamma I’ve got to tell you
mamma mamma mamma mamma comes out of
my mouth three times in a row three times the
first – pause – his wracking cough then the two
others fused fused at top speed.

As the narrator’s voice here contemplates the implications of how and why speech sometimes comes out of our mouths repeatedly, the naturalness of the mental rambling is enforced by an absence of punctuation in many places. Staying true on the page to patterns of thought is no easy task, but You Are the Business is frequently like a brain laid out on paper. Also, an absence of question marks in a book full of questions yields more authority to that voice. These tools, which lend every bit toward psychological authenticity, can at times leave the reader wondering what the hell is happening, as themes from earlier sections often weave back into later sections to create a book of poems that is a rather complex organism.

Dubois employs this scientific/analytical inquiry to contemplate such topics as the causes of the remains we embrace, as well as the remains of what we have caused. The poems are often in the voice of one or several characters, based primarily on “icons of cult film from Simone Simon to Blade Runner” according to the publisher’s press release. References to “Patty Duke” and “Blade Runner Rachel” and “Cat People” seem as if they are meant to orientate the reader, but can actually be less accessible than more abstract references to “x” and “fake x” (algebraic renderings about love) or “sister in two parts,” which explores one of its parts as “my / false twin sister.” Fakeness is explored as a layered concept, as is the idea of symptoms, such as coughs or words spoken: “symptoms get doubled and are not shared.” A certain postmodern psychological inertia can thus erupt in the reader, as media images, scenes, etc., tend to be over-wondered, intentionally, via neurotic self-analysis. In one poem, Dubois utilizes such fixation toward determining criteria, “and as for criteria whose.” The title of the book could as easily have been “My little scatterbrain,” a line that serves also as a stanza, as the poems’ contents are scattered yet inexorably connected, shuffling their tangents into an almost inexplicable whole. In short, Dubois’s ability to point to the complex contradictory nature in the connectedness of things makes this good reading for the psychiatrists of psychiatrists’ psychiatrists.

At times, the reader may get the notion that these poems are akin to something one would sing in the shower or try reading aloud in a foreign accent to the cat. They are not the masturbatory brainiacal wordplay some might categorize as Language Poetry, but rather a natural psychological sprawl—not in the sense of blah-blah yada-yada, but in the sense of movement— like that of a coffee addict tweaking out on whatever the subject is (one often can’t tell). These aspects, love’m or hate’m, are how one recognizes Pushcart Prize-winning Cole Swensen’s brilliant translation. It flows without hiccup, attentive to rhythms, voice consistency, and grammatical mutations.

You Are the Business is a shot in the arm with regard to the author’s style (and the translator’s magnificent reproduction of such). But a discerning reading acknowledges that the poems in this book might serve Art better by referencing characters more universal in nature, that is to say with images that can be more easily grasped without the aid of further research into their intended meaning (or necessary footnotes). If readers of You Are the Business can (figuratively) adorn their helicopter hats and try to read the book in the way Homer or Dante or Baudelaire or Whitman or even a curmudgeonly old friend might read it, then they will find a welcomed sample of contemporary French poetry. But a poetry that has unfortunately been infiltrated by one of the worst aspects of American media-culture, meaning that pop culture has begun to continually reference itself in a shallow and naïve approach toward the making of literature.

Further reading:
An interview with Dubois, translated to English by Swensen, can be found here: http://www.chicagopostmodernpoetry.com/caroldubois.htm