Eight Poems by Hadar Lotan translated from Hebrew by Michael Ben-Haim
*Preliminary remark: all of the poems are from נראה אותך חוצה את זה בחיים, all untitled, except for poems number 4 and 7.
#1
Don’t even start.
Once you start it turns into
a demonic possession.
Once you start scratching and peeling
the skin burns,
lit by memory flashlights.
Trapped beneath your fingernails
dried up memory cells
fresh memory scabs.
On the surface
remain
damp red craters,
single-use
vibrating gateways
to parallel worlds:
backwards, inside.
Within the membranes of the inner negation of time
the forest’s fierce shadow play moves
with fragments of motion.
Joints disjointed into a mute forest dance,
alien storm rages
with lightning flashes
afar.
Among the branches
above the timber,
above dozens of new skin layers
that glimmer
the heart converses with itself
quietly.
#2
In the dead of night
primeval onions awake
in the blanket of earth.
Dark consciousness
touches their dormant bodies
with greasy fingertips.
And they sense that the season has come
the right season to hold their heads high,
to flower toxic stars
in the surrounding pitch-black.
The onions push through to my sleep.
The flower column props up
my eyelids,
a foreign liquid is infused into my dozing heart
and causes my limbs to tremble with cold.
Electricity rushes, taking hold of every part of me.
I am compelled to watch
the hypnotizing flowers rotating,
the living column of memory,
the extensions of the glowing illusion
multiplying and multiplying
into a painful field of delusions.
To turn over and over
until my awakened power is strong enough to slice
the onions.
To cut into them sharply.
#3
A.
The nocturnal dogs
bark.
Like the insomniacs, they understand
the painful boundaries
of the flesh.
Like the insomniacs, they await
behind curtains.
B.
I wander
jaw-dropped
outside darkened windows
sniffing out love.
Expecting leftovers
C.
The moon carries its dignity
like a lighthouse.
Let it shine
white and enamored
the light.
D.
I have
dirty teeth
and a torn-up heart.
#4 “A Hare”
On a highway.
All that passes by —
cuts too quickly
all that lights up —
penetrates your eyes, blinding them.
This is your stage
these are the spotlights —
a frozen performance.
Let’s see you get across it alive.
#5
With eyes half open
I make a sandwich for work.
A dull blade slides on the edge of the desert.
A roadway awakens,
a bridge rises to cross a lazy stream,
Be’er-Sheva snuggles
under fog and haze.
On the kitchen windowsill
a falcon lands
we are both caught by surprise.
She stares at me
attentively,
then flies away.
The black and yellow
of her wide-open eyes
rub the sleep from mine.
She calls me
with the honed hook of her mouth.
I recognize the warning wail.
Primal memory stub knocking on
consciousness’ jail.
Under the work clothes I grope for
my hunched shoulder blades:
that spot
where wings grow.
#6
At first, I was but a stone
deaf-mute
expressing a wide landscape.
All the materials were inside of me
with an invisible movement, compressed.
The water and wind shaped my image.
When the sun shone, I sparkled,
I was a stone.
One amongst many.
One day I was found.
A hand picked me up
from the ground
and set fire with me.
#7 “Fire in the Forest”
Fire consumes
lovers’ trails,
and I, once asleep,
now awake.
Among the trees
wild animals
farther and farther
will beat birds
into phoenixes
higher and higher.
In the encircling smoke
from their own ashes
will rise:
trees
birds
and wildlife.
I will be there with them,
my heart galloping.
#8
She wanted me to ride the horse
and sent me to the horses.
She asked me to lead and hold the reigns,
to will strongly for the swaying velvety mountain.
Ears receding backwards.
The horse and I both expose our teeth.
Then she clacked her teeth from a distance,
from a tiny, closed room
that has
a small window
and where horses don’t run.
She clacked her teeth
shutting her ears to
my frightened
neigh.
And the horse started galloping.
And the reigns slipped away
and it ran and galloped below me above me around me
and I was dropped
robbed of the horse, of the road.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put me back together again
only I only I with my two bare hands
with strong bone glue.
Editorial Commentary
In the fall semester of 2020, while taking the course Prosody and Translation with Prof. Marcela Sulak at Bar Ilan University, I was tasked with contacting an Israeli poet and asking for permission to translate around 10 poems. Not sure how to approach the matter, I turned to Google to see what the contemporary Israeli poetry scene had to offer. I have no recollection of the exact search words I used, but I quickly landed on a poem by Hadar Lotan and was immediately captivated. Less than a minute into the reading process, I knew she was the poet I wanted to work with. So I emailed her, and to my surprise, she cordially allowed me to translate her work.
What attracted me to her poems? My reaction to them occurred at a gut level and was so immediate, that it is a real challenge to formulate the answer in clear, conceptual terms. Reflecting on it now though, I suppose it had something to do with the evocative, imaginative way her poems bring the relation between humans and nature to life. As you will see, this relation takes on many forms in her poetry. Sometimes, the human being redeems nature of its anonymity and gives it identity and life, as in one of the poems you are about to read which describes a “deaf-mute” stone that is eventually picked up by a human hand and used to set fire. At other times, a natural element interferes with a human activity (“The onions push through to my sleep”), and there is one poem in the collection presented below that describes how a human-animal encounter gives rise to an embodied resonance; confronted by a falcon, Lotan describes the “black and yellow” of the bird’s “wide open eyes” rub the sleep from hers, and then ends with an evocation of a mythic human-bird hybrid: “Under the work clothes I grope for/ my hunched shoulder blades:/ that spot/ where wings grow.” But even though the relationship between nature and humans keeps changing and shifting in Lotan’s poetry, it is a constant presence. This, I think, places her work squarely within the margins of what is known today as eco-poetry, an observation she herself confirmed in a private email correspondence.
Lotan’s voice is definitely one of an eco-poet. Yet, it does not rely on direct moral exhortation and explicit call for environmental action. It raises our ecological awareness in a different, subtler way. I would argue that it does so by awakening what Theodor Roszak calls the ecological unconscious, namely, by raising to conscious awareness an echo of a very deep and very primal human-nature connection.
My main challenge as a translator was to recapture this sense of restored connection in English, while retaining Lotan’s minimalism, lexical economy, and tendency to keep the lines short and sweet. Given that English is wordier than Hebrew, this was not an easy task. I hope I was able to live up to it, and that this modest selection will provide the English-speaking audience a glimpse into the work of a unique and enchanting contemporary poetic voice.
~Michael Ben-Haim