From the Naive to the Nostalgic in the Poetry of Haim Gouri

REUVEN SHOHAM From the Naive to the Nostalgic in the Poetry of Haim Gouri HAIM GOURI IS A PROMINENT MEMBER of the generation of Israeli poets who began publishing in the 1940s and came to prominence with the War of Independence. Like that of other poets of the so-called Palmach Generation (Amir Gilboa, Shlomo Tanay, Hillel Omer, Abba Kovner, Ozer Rabin, T. Carmi, and Natan Yonatan), Gouri's early poetry, collected in his first book, Pirhei esh (Flowers of fire, 1949), is preoccupied with the experience of war, the sacrifice of youth, the solidarity of comradeship, the fate of love in times of danger. Gouri, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1922, was dispatched to Europe to smuggle survivors into Palestine after the Holocaust and served in the Palmach in the battles of the Negev in 1948. In the genealogy of modern Hebrew poetry, Gouri plays a significant role mediating between the poetics of two distinct generations: the high modernism of Avraham Shlonsky and Natan Alterman in the 1920s and 1930s, and the colloquial modernism of Yehuda Amichai and Natan Zach in the 1950s and 1960s. In this paper, I endeavor to sketch Gouri's struggle to find his own path between these two rival poetics. I view his early poetry under the sign of the naive; the poems' speakers inhabit a romantic world of which they are an integral part, and they speak in the inflational poetics of romance. Beginning around 1960, as a result of his encounter with Western literature and with the poetry of his younger contemporaries , Gouri's poetic speaker disengages from the naive world and begins to view it from the outside as an object of nostalgic longing. To appreciate the pathos of that change, we must first witness the mystique of innocence created in Gouri's early verse. PROOFTEXTS 18 (1998): 19-tó ß 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 20REUVEN SHOHAM The young Haim Gouri tends to portray the world he creates by direct characterization—time and place, speakers and protagonists, and the relationship among all these—with a tendency to overstatement in his poetry. The qualities ascribed to the protagonists or the objects are polarized through the use of the qualifier "very": very beautiful, very strong, with a preference for positive rather than negative aspects. This is true of all his poetry, starting with Pirhei esh and ending with Haba aharai (The next in line, 1994). The world created by Gouri in his poetry is typified by a tendency toward superlatives. The opening poem of Pirhei esh, "Tiyul balaila" (Night-time walk), provides us with some idea of that atmosphere: ,pinyy nytp p??? ·>p? ny^m — naVí .p?p rrrlya p? ,at^?* D^ato p? .pß* 1Vy I1Vn ,n^Vnin man .??»?·} T1PIn p????t ,T?? ?p?? Ta? yna — ??? WQ] ^Vo? uk] ,CPQ1PPi; ?>-)?: ,1IQCo VTaan UUT1 ,D1D'^ 1V D1Q-J;! ,?31? "73"JVC ,nia ^V ^'îis »in?* D1VIy^Qn ntej73¦¦ViVa^n ?^?? nipyn ta ,nlV¡? D1Va I1VnJ D1Vy? Dna^ 1^j; ?-?pp p1^} D1VVi? r«¥? i'V1 ??ps m? 1V1VrJ S1^a? ·??'?p rila^na "?y 131?)? Vij nao ,???fp -qy Vrç> .?}1^ itfni -iotf ?f ?131?3 Vy 1IpIn — nyap lyyj .????9 ??{f? lana HV1Vd ny-|3 p?-? ?}p .njlnN1] p??? t?? ny^n) Let's walk, and let it be the very hour, / Stars come down and the wind comes up. / The firefly takes wing, alights on a braid. / Like a very secret hand, silence breeds silence. / And we, very beautiful, walk on. / Wildly the hidden banjo twangs, / Shaking a tree on the road. / The pines drip sap. / The fog thickens, veiling silence. / Where the lanes end I stoop to offer you a flower / and with it you crown your dark head. / We exchange a few idle words, / Speak softly of trivial things. / A crescent moon makes the dew sparkle / on the fleece of the sheep. The flute / of the flock of hours sounds / dying into the pale chill dawn. / We pause a bit. You turn on your toes / and suddenly we are kissed. / Soon the night with its jackal will break / and the hour wiil be holy and destitute, (p. 7)1 The Poetry of Haim Gouri21 The...