Points of Departure

by Dan Pagis, Stephen Mitchell (Translator), Robert Alter (Introduction)

This volume offers a representative selection—over fifty poems—of one of the leading Hebrew poets of this generation. Dan Pagis, born in Romania in 1930. spent three years in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1946 he arrived in Israel and subsequently settled in Jerusalem, where he is now professor of medieval Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University. His imaginative landscape extends from the grim vistas of genocide to the luminous horizon of medieval Hebrew poetry and includes a series of “science-fiction” poems where time is accelerated distorted, even reversed.

123 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 1982

Reviews

[Surya V.n]

Dan Pagis Poems


1. Instruction for Crossing the Border

Imaginary man, go. Here is your passport.
You are not allowed to remember.
You have to match the description:
your eyes are already blue.
Don’t escape with the sparks
inside the smokestack:
you are a man, you sit in the train.
Sit comfortably.
You’ve got a decent coat now,
a repaired body, a new name
ready in your throat.
Go. You are not allowed to forget.


2. The Story

Once I read a story
about a grasshopper one day old,
a green adventurer who at dusk
was swallowed up by a bat.
Right after this the wise old owl
gave a short consolation speech:
Bats also have the right to make a living,
and there are many grasshoppers still left.
Right after this came
the end: an empty page.
Forty years now have gone by.
Still leaning above that empty page,
I do not have the strength
to close the book.


3. Snake

The sand is swift, overflowing,
burrowing inside itself, searching
for remnants, tombstones, ancestors’
bones.
I never understood this hunger
for the past. I
am a series of instants,
shed my skin with ease,
forget,
outsmart myself.
In all this desert only I can guess
who was who.


4. Sudden Heart

Sudden heart, tightrope walker with no rope
and no rest, how long will it be?
Down in the lighted arena the horses shake their heads
over you, their bright plumes waving good-bye.
And already the mournful tuba
and that sentimental codger, the double bass,
lament you in a syncopated rhythm.
Far down below
to meet your fall, stretches
the drum.
But this blue void,
this free fall,
this piercing joy


5. Seashell

Coiled into myself, I was not a seashell for your voice.
I will remain on the unsteady sand.
If a passerby happened to pick me up,
to try me as an ear, to listen in me for good news
of the sea—I didn’t say a word.
With murmuring, with delusive silence,
I gave him back the wide-awake beat
of his blood. As if I had sung: as if he had heard.
Emptier than ever, imprisoned in my convolutions,
how will I live by the commands that you didn’t give me,
and on what shore, to what rest’s end?
I remain on the shifting sand.
I have no escape from your silence.