New Poems in an Ancient Language

The contemporary Hebrew-language poet is entering a crowded arena. Psalmists, prophets, compilers of scripture, paytanim, and two thousand years of subsequent scholars, legists, rabbis, and poets—they've all been there before, they've all done it already. Where does one begin? So many ordinary words carry powerful ancient echoes, so many images or phrases are inseparable from their roots in the sacred texts. And meanwhile, other swaths of vocabulary stand out as modern coinages or foreign borrowings. To use a simple word like "wall" or "water" or "bread" is to summon ancient ghosts, who may or may not be wanted. And then, when the next word is "telephone," a different kind of obtrusive echo occurs, and the problem becomes how to reconcile levels of language from radically different places, periods, and styles.

Using such a loaded language, a poet can hardly avoid taking as one of his subjects the tradition itself and his own fraught relationship with it. This presents certain obvious difficulties, such as: how does one write simply about ordinary life? But it also offers opportunities: for irony, wit, subversion, and the built-in dramatic tension that comes from juxtaposing ancient with modern, serious with vulgar (or playful, or banal). The struggle with the past is intrinsic to the language, so the struggle itself might as well be brought front and center.

In his new book, the Israeli poet Admiel Kosman shifts his voice adroitly between ancient and modern, while never seeming quite settled in either. There is a persistent restlessness; nothing is ever straightforward or taken for granted. The poems wrestle with God, spiritual practice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the place of a poet's work in society, the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and the baggage of tradition borne by the Hebrew language itself. Spanning Kosman's thirty-two-year career, the book contains selections from the nine volumes of poetry he has published in Hebrew, and it brings them to English-speaking readers for the first time in translations by Lisa Katz with assistance from Shlomit Naim-Naor. Hebrew and English texts are presented on facing pages (or, should one say, opposing pages?).

Wrestling with Tradition

Although only a few of the poems seem explicitly personal, let alone autobiographical, Kosman's background is clearly relevant to the tensions embodied by the work. He was raised in an Orthodox family, attended Orthodox schools, and continued to study at a yeshiva during his army service. He later studied graphic design and pottery at the Bezalel art college, but then dropped out of art school and instead pursued a Ph.D. in talmudic studies at the traditionalist Bar Ilon University. He continued to teach there for many years, eventually directing the Faculty of Hermeneutics. Then, in 2003, he moved to Berlin, where he became a professor of Jewish Studies at Potsdam University and the director of the Abraham Geiger Reform Rabbinical Seminary. In addition to publishing poetry, he has published three volumes of "post-modern interpretations of midrash," with a focus on gender roles and identities.

The traditionalism in Kosman's background is evident not just in his deployment of allusions and quotations from the Bible, and not just in his knowledge of the rituals and liturgy of Judaism, but also in the seriousness with which he approaches these things. A number of the poems are addressed to God, and they seem to really mean it (at least, mostly). Prayer is repeatedly invoked or enacted. The ideas of blessings and curses, of redemptive sacrifices, of the soul, and even of angels aren't just figures of speech or archaisms in Kosman's poems; they're living concepts, they're painfully real.

But at the same time, there's always the undercurrent of irony, the self-conscious struggle with the tradition. The title poem, "Approaching You in English" (which, interestingly, was written in Hebrew), depicts a speaker who fluctuates between meekness and audacity. He begs God to accept his prayer, even in something other than the sacred tongue, and he does so very humbly—but he also seems...