Admiel Kosman
Lament for the Ninth of Av
Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz
For cantor and congregants:
To be sung softly after reading the Book of Lamentations
Hardly any room for the body,
my daughter.
The soul has seized nearly
everything by force.
Hardly any room left for the
body, though
it’s true, my daughter, words
were etched in stone,
but violently.
Hardly any room for the body.
Nearly everything was written.
And all is turned to plunder
inside the temple.
The body, torn and split,
crumbles from the weight of the soul
trampling and destroying,
spreading fear all around. Hardly any
room left for the body.
Crushed, my daughter, broken, my daughter. Totally destroyed.
And prey for the soul.
Hardly any room for the body,
my daughter, in exile
or when it leaves its place
to wander, like a deportee
coming and going on the face
of the earth, inching along, moving.
Didn’t we know exactly,
everything was written
my daughter. In those days
there was no king,
and there won’t be room for
the body.
The soul will control
everything.
Southern angels, northern
ones, angels of rage and guilt,
will shroud the blood with
gold...the ark curtain...a robe....
shroud the ark, sure to
arrive, in the horrors of war.
And the heart will know its
mistake,
terribly aware:
everything was etched in
stone, but violently.
Admiel Kosman, currently on sabbatical from Bar Ilan University,
where he is professor of Talmud, has been teaching at Oxford and in
Berlin and Potsdam this year. Born in Israel in 1957, he is the author
of seven books of poems and writes a column on Midrash for an Israeli
newspaper.
Lisa Katz is co-editor of the Israeli pages of the
Holland-based Poetry International web site (http://israel.poetryinternational.org);
she teaches in the English Department of the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. Her translations of Israeli literature are forthcoming in Tikkun and
Prairie Schooner, and have appeared in American
Poetry Review and The New Yorker, and numerous other
magazines. |
