When you come to the study of Hebrew literature late in the game, as I have, there are always going to be considerable gaps. I began to study Hebrew at the age of 21 and didn't even begin to read steadily in the language until a few years later. It's a very long process--some have warned me I may not even feel at home in the language for another fifteen years--but the history of Israeli writing is full of authors and critics who undertook the study and mastery of the Hebrew language even later than I have, so I can't complain.
One of the gaps I had endeavored to tackle this summer was Dahlia Ravikovitch, an Israeli poet who was born in 1936 and belongs (to the extent that any poet "belongs" anywhere) to the Statehood Generation of Israeli writing (Yehuda Amichai, the the Israeli poet most familiar to the English reader also falls into this classification). I had read a few of her poems here and there, but not enough to arrive at my own understanding of her work. Literary critic Nissim Calderon observed recently that "[Ravikovitch] was careful in her writing and therefore almost everything she wrote is wonderful. She wrote relatively few poems, but they were [like] finely sifted flour." I have been reading and enjoying Ravikovitch's first volume, Ahavat tapuach ha-zahav (1959), courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Just today, looking up some information on Ravikovitch on the web, I found her obituary. She died in late August, most likely a suicide. Again, as when I tried to write a post on Batya Gur, I am struck by the truth in Benjamin's understanding of translation as Überleben, afterlife. Because if you google "Dahlia Ravikovitch" in English, almost no mention of her death appears. The death of "Dalia Ravikovitch," on the other hand, is ubiquitous. And so I feel like I'm killing "Dahlia" somehow in this other language, the one that I also use to conjure her presence:
"On October 1942 her 33-year old father was run over by an inebriated Greek soldier in the British Army. At first, she was told that he had been injuried. On her sixth birthday, which took place two weeks later, she received gifts in his name: a schoolbag and pencil box. She only understood that her father was dead after talking to a classmate. Years later she included her father's poems in a children's book. In his journal, which she found after his death, he described her as a unique child, who could read and write by the age of three." (via Ha-arets)
The Hebrew word for pencil-box is "kalmar," which is homophonic with the Spanish verb "calmar," to soothe, calm. These are the meanings only translation uncovers, also as a consolation.
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