A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Michael Gluzman, “‘To Endow Suffering with Elegance’: Dahlia Ravikovitch and the Poetry of the Statehood Generation,” Prooftexts 28 (2008): 282–309. Gluzman explores Ravikovitch’s poetics against the background of the stylistic and ideological dynamics of the Generation of the State. 2. Miri Baruch, Iyunim beshirat dahlia ravikovitch [Studies in Dahlia Ravikovitch’s poetry] (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1974); and Juliette Hassin, Shirah vemitos beyetzirata shel dahlia ravikovitch [Poetry and myth in Ravikovitch’s work] (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1989). 3. Ayelet Negev, “Dahlia Ravikovitch Speaks. About It All,” Yediot aharonot, February 23, 1996, 22, 26–28. Translated in Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, trans. Hovering At A Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009) (subsequently BK), 19, and quoted also in Hamutal Tsamir and Tamar Hess, eds., Khitmei or [Sparks of light: Essays about Dahlia Ravikovitch’s ouevre] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2010), 14. 4. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Exploration in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4. 5. Hélène Cixous describes the écriture féminine as having the power to challenge logocentric and phallogocentric thought, and to create a language that will differ from the patriarchal binary hierarchy. See “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93. In her complex approach to the polarities of passivity and activity, Ravikovitch takes on this role, deconstructs binary structures, and establishes a different way of thinking. About the blurring of this separation, while criticizing aspects of Zionism in the poem “The Messiah’s Arrival” (Biat hamashiach), see Hamutal Tsamir, “The Dead and the Living, the Believers and the Uprooted: Dahlia Ravikovitch, Mourner and Prophet” [in Hebrew], in Mikhan 1 (2000): 44–63; and Beshem hanof [In the name of the land: nationalism, subjectivity and gender in the Israeli poetry of the statehood generation] (Jerusalem: Keter Books, Beer-Sheva: Heksherim Center, 2006). About the deconstruction of binary oppositions in the poem “Even a Thousand Years” (Afilu elef shanim), see Tamar Hess, “The Poetica of the Fig Tree: Feminist Aspects in the Early Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch” [in Hebrew], Mikhan 1 (2000): 27–43. 6. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 7. Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis), trans. Martha Noel Evans and the author, with the assistance of Brian Massumi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 142 ][ Notes Part 1: Forever Beholden 1. Translated from the Hebrew by Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 67. As Rosen observes, a bilingual homonym is exploited in the name of the poem, Shirah yetomah (A female orphan poem), “referring also to yatima in the Arabic sense, namely, outstanding, one of a kind” (214). 1. Poetics of Orphanhood 1. Baruch Kurzweil, “Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Poems” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, December 25, 1959; Yair Mazor, “A Portrait of Shame as a City of Refuge: About Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Poetry” [in Hebrew], Iton 77 206 (1997): 19. 2. Hannah Naveh, Bishvi haevel [Captives of mourning: Representation of bereavement in Hebrew literature] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993), 31–36. 3. Dahlia Ravikovitch, Kol hashirim [The Complete Poems], eds. Giddon Ticotsky and Uzi Shavit (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2010) (subsequently CP) 19; Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch, trans., The Window: Poems by Dahlia Ravikovitch (New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1989) (subsequently BB) 3. 4. Caruth, Trauma: Exploration in Memory, 10. 5. Baruch, Studies in Dahlia Ravikovitch’s poetry, 14. 6. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977). 7. For further discussion of the sonnet form in this poem and its relation to the symbolic order and the semiotic, see Ilana Szobel, “‘She Tried to Escape and Lost Her Senses’: Alienation and Madness in the Stories of Dahlia Ravikovitch” [in Hebrew], Teoryah uvikoret 28 (2006): 127–55. For a different interpretation of Ravikovitch’s use of the sonnet in this poem, see Shira Stav, “The Father, the Daughter, and the Gaze” [in Hebrew], in Khitmei or [Sparks of light: Essays about Dahlia Ravikovitch’s oeuvre], eds. Hamutal Tsamir and Tamar S. Hess (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2010), 284–322. 8. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld translate this line as follows: “But I became damaged goods that night” (BK, 63). 9. Baba kama 79a; Shulhan arukh, Hoshen mishpat 409c. 10. Kurzweil, “Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Poems.” 11. See Allison Schachter, “A Lily among the Bullfrogs: Dahlia Ravikovitch and the...