Dahlia Ravikovich va nàixer a Ramat Gan (Tel Aviv) en l’any 1.936, filla d’un enginyer jueu ben racionalista i d’una mare que era mestra i prevenia d’un ambient religiós. A l’edat de tres anys, Dahlia sap llegir i escriure, a l’edat de sis anys el seu estimat pare mor en un accident de trànsit: no cessarà d’al·ludir-lo en prou poemes al llarg de la vida; sa mare i ella marxen a viure al kibbutz Geva; l’ambient col·lectivista li sembla sufocant i als tretze anys marxa cap a una de les moltes llars adoptives de Haifa.

Als divuit anys es casa: quan passen tres mesos acaba en divorç, tal com va fer en dos matrimonis que seguirien. Estudia literatura a la Universitat Hebrea de Jerusalem, treballa com a mestra i periodista. Tradueix a WB Yeats, TS Eliot i Edgar Allan Poe. Des de 1.959, adapta Mary Pompins a l’hebreu i escriu llibres per a infants, també publica contes per a adults (incloent “L’equip de futbol de Winnie Mandela” i “Ella ve i se’n va”).

El seu primer poemari “L’amor per una taronja” guanya immediatament l’interés del públic i la crítica. Anima generosament als escriptors novells, s’associa amb poetes que encapçalen l’avantguardisme com Natan Zach, Yehuda Amitai i David Amitan. D’expressió senzilla i farcits de riques connotacions, els seus poemes són portats a les escoles, alguns esdevenen cançons populars. Guanya el Premi Bialik per la seua poesia en 1987, el Premi Literari Israel en 1997 i el Premi del Primer Ministre en 2005. La seua poesia s’ha traduit a 23 idiomes. “Vestit de Foc” (1978) i “La Finestra” (1.989) apareixen en anglés.

Fa campanya pels drets dels palestins, contra els colons messiànics nacionalistes i també critica “la cultura del no-res” dels israelis secularistes. A l’última fase de la seua vida, hom diu que entra en períodes depressius, dorm de dia i està activa per la nit, té romanços (alguns per internet) que extenuen la seua dinàmica sentimental, pateix insolvència i relacions tempestuoses. El 21 d’agost de 2005, a l’edat de 69 anys se la troben morta a sa casa: la premsa no aclareix si per suïcidi o per una aturada cardíaca. Els seus treballs poètics revelen el seu anhel per la llibertat i la justícia.

Clockwork Doll

by Dalia Ravikovitch (from Found in Translation: A Hundred Years of Modern Hebrew Poetry Edited and introduced by Gabriel Levin. (Menard Press, London, 1999)

I was a clockwork doll that night,
and I turned left and I turned right
and when I fell and broke to bits,
they recomposed my wax and wits.

I was a proper doll once more,
my manner carefully demure;
and yet a doll of another kind—
an injured twig that tendrils bind.

And when they asked me to a ball—
although my steps were rhythmical,
they partnered me with dog and cat.

My hair was gold, my eyes were blue.
I wore a dress where flowers grew.
Cherries blazed on my straw hat.

 

MECHANICAL DOLL (versió anglesa de Karen Alkalay-Gut)

And that night I was a mechanical doll

and I turned right and left, to all sides

and I fell on my face and broke to bits,

and they tried to put me together with skillful hands

 

And then I went back to being a correct doll

and all my manners were studied and compliant.

But by then I was a different kind of doll

like a wounded twig hanging by a tendril.

 

And then I went to dance at a ball,

but they left me in the company of cats and dogs

even though all my steps were measured and patterned.

 

And I had golden hair and I had blue eyes

and I had a dress the color of the flowers in the garden

and I had a straw hat decorated with a cherry.

 

LA NINA MECÀNICA (versió ràpida en català de JCOB)

 

I eixa nit jo era una nina mecànica,

Girava a la dreta, a l’esquerra, cap a tots els costats,

Vaig caure en la meua cara i em vaig trencar a trossos,

Ells van recomposar la meua cera i enginys,

 

I vaig tornar a ser una nina ben correcta,

I totes les meues maneres foren estudiades i dòcils.

I encara era una nina d’una altra classe:

Una branqueta ferida, encastada a un penjoll.

 

I després me’n vaig anar a ballar damunt una pilota,

Però ells em van abandonar en companyia de gats i gossos:

De res valia que les meues passes foren rítmiques i modelades.

 

Els meus cabells eren daurats, els meus ulls atzurs,

Vaig portar un vestit on creixien les flors.

Les cireres espurnejaven en el meu capell de palla

 

 Imatge: La poeta israeliana Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005)

 

[Hi ha més: altres poemes seus sobre la barbàrie
i un article ben escrit a The Guardian]

 

(versions en anglés de Karen Alkalay-Gut)

GET OUT BEIRUT

Take the knapsacks

and the utensils and washtubs

and the books of the Koran

and the army fatigues

and the tall tales and the torn soul

and whatever’s left, bread or meat,

and kids running around like chickens in the village.

How many children do you have?

How many children did you have?

It’s hard to keep tabs on kids in a situation like this.

Not like in the old country

in the shade of the mosque and the fig tree,

when the children the children would be shooed outside by day

and put to bed at night.

Put whatever isn’t fragile into sacks,

clothes and blankets and bedding and diapers

and something for a souvenir

like a shiny artillery shell perhaps,

or some kind of useful tool,

and the babies with rheumy eyes

and the R.P.G. kids.

We want to see you in the water, sailing aimlessly

with no harbor and no shore.

You won’t be accepted anywhere

You are banished human beings.

You are people who don’t count

You are people who aren’t needed

You are a pinch of lice

stinging and itching

to madness.

 

A BABY CAN’T BE KILLED TWICE

On the sewage puddles of Sabra and Shattila

there you transferred masses of human beings

worthy of respect

from the world of the living to the world of the dead.

Night after night.

First they shot

then they hung

and finally slaughtered with knives.

Terrified women rushed up

from over the dust hills:

“There they slaughter us

in Shatilla”

A narrow tail of the new moon hung

above the camps.

Our soldiers illuminated the place with flares

like daylight.

“Back to the camps, March!” the soldier commanded

the screaming women of Sabra and shatilla.

He had orders to follow,

And the children were already laid in the puddles of waste,

their mouths open,

at rest.

Noone will harm them.

A baby can’t be killed twice.

And the tail of the moon filled out

until it turned into a loaf of whole gold.

Our dear sweet soldiers,

asked nothing for themselves –

how strong was their hunger

to return home in peace.

THE TALE OF THE ARAB WHO DIED BY FIRE

When the fire grabbed his body, it didn’t happen by degrees.

There was no burst of heat before,

or giant wave of smothering smoke

and the feeling of a spare room one wants to escape to.

The fire held him at once

– there are no metaphors for this –

it peeled off his clothes

cleaved to his flesh.

The skin nerves were the first to be touched.

The hair was consumed.

God! They are burning! he shouted.

And that is all he could do in self-defense.

The flesh was already burning between the shack’s boards

that fed the fire in the first stage.

There was already no consciousness in him.

The fire burning his flesh

numbed his sense of future

and the memories of his family.

and he had no more ties to his childhood

and he didn’t ask for revenge, salvation,

or to see the dawn of the next day.

He just wanted to stop burning.

But his body supported the conflagration

and he was as if bound and fettered,

and of that too he did not think.

And he continued to burn by the power of his body

made of hair and wax and tendons.

And he burned a long time.

And from his throat inhuman voices issued

for many of his human functions had already ceased,

except for the pain the nerves transmit

in electric impulses

to the pain center in the brain.

and that didn’t last longer than a day.

And it was good that his soul was freed that day

because he deserved to rest.

———————————————————————— 

Obituary

Dalia Ravikovitch

Israeli poet whose work revealed her yearning for liberty and justice

• Lawrence Joffe
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 August 2005 00.11 BST
• Article history

The Israeli poet Dalia Ravikovitch, who has died aged 69, was one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Hebrew literature. She is believed to have committed suicide.

Readers found a kindred spirit in her writing, a voice that admitted vulnerability in a society suffused with pioneering values and nationalist verities. Women especially identified with Ravikovitch, whose journey from girlhood to adulthood reflected their own experiences of solitude, tenderness, unrequited love and the arbitrariness of fate.

Ravikovitch’s poems seem disarmingly simple, yet swarm with multiple meanings. Often they are shocking. In Hovering At A Low Altitude she conveys a menace made more potent for being so ambiguous. Initially the narrator hints at rural idylls under God’s soothing hand. But gradually it becomes apparent we are witnessing the rape and murder of a young Arab girl through the eyes of the perpetrator. The critic Hanna Kronfeld has suggested that the poem’s refrain “I am not here” mocks the moral detachment of complacent Tel Aviv urbanites.

Hovering appeared in 1982, the year Israel invaded Lebanon. This watershed event led the poet to adopt a new voice, colloquial and outraged. One particularly sardonic poem, You Cannot Kill A Baby Twice, describes Israeli soldiers, who ostensibly yearn for peace, driving back to Sabra and Chatilla women and children who face certain death by Phalangist thugs. Another work laments how war reduces humans to “a pinch of lice, stinging and itching to madness”. Rightists called her new work strident and unpatriotic.

Subversive wit and a yearning for liberty and justice inform much of Ravikovitch’s writing. Her earlier work is full of puns, Biblical references and playful allusions to Greek mythology, faraway palaces and kings. In Pride she transposes human emotions on to an inanimate object, a rock that survives eons, only to crumble when rubbed by a little seal. “When rocks break, it happens by surprise. /And people too.” Even her poem Clockwork Doll, which may depict recovery from a breakdown, or social strictures on women, sounds like a child’s ditty.

… and when I fell and

broke to bits,

They recomposed my wax

and wits.

I was a proper doll once

more

My manner carefully

demure;

And yet a doll of another

kind –

An injured twig that tendrils bind.

Ravikovitch was born in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Her father, Levi, was a Russian-born Jewish engineer, a rationalist, who arrived in British Mandate Palestine from China. Her mother, Michal, a teacher, came from a religious household.

From the age of three Ravikovitch could read and write. But tragedy struck when her beloved father was run over and killed by a drunken driver. Six at the time of his death, Ravikovitch left Tel Aviv for Kibbutz Geva with her mother. She found the collectivist mentality there stifling, and at 13 moved to the first of many foster homes in Haifa.

Ravikovitch married at 18, but after three months the union ended in divorce, as did two subsequent marriages. She started publishing poetry while completing compulsory army conscription. Her first collection, Love For The Orange, appeared in 1959, and won immediate critical acclaim.

Having studied literature at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Ravikovitch worked variously as a journalist and high school teacher. She translated the poetry of WB Yeats, TS Eliot and Edgar Allan Poe, and rendered the book Mary Poppins into Hebrew. Starting in 1959 she wrote seven much-loved children’s books, and also penned volumes of short stories for adults, including Winnie Mandela’s Football Team (1997) and She Came And Went (2005).

Ravikovich generously encouraged younger writers and associated with leading avant garde poets Natan Zach, Yehuda Amichai and David Amitan. Her poems are taught in schools; and several were turned into popular songs. She won the Bialik Prize for her poetry in 1987 and the Israel Literary Prize in 1998. Her poetry has been translated into 20 languages. Dress Of Fire (1978) and The Window (1989), appear in English.

She campaigned for Palestinian rights, and against messianic settler nationalists; yet she also criticised fellow Israeli secularists’ “culture of nothingness”. Ravikovitch, who slept during the day and worked at night, suffered perennial bouts of depression, insolvency and tempestuous relationships. She had attempted suicide before.

Ravikovitch once joked that a poet is worth less than a garlic peel. Thousands of fans would disagree. She is survived by her twin brothers, Ahikam and Amiram, and her son, Ido.

· Dalia Ravikovitch, poet, born November 27 1936; died August 21 2005

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