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Poetry Unbound
Yehuda Amichai — Poems as Teachers | Ep 6
00:14:04
Being right may feel good, but what human price do we pay for this feeling of rightness? Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The Place Where We Are Right,” translated by Stephen Mitchell, asks us to answer this question, consider how doubt and love might expand and enrich our perspective, and reflect upon the buried and not-so-buried ruins of past conflicts, arguments, and wounds that still call for our attention.
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My name is Padraig Otooma, and a number of years ago I was leading a community mediation in the north of Ireland. And in the context of the mediation, somebody said the most frightening experience I ever had was 20 years ago when I spoke at a youth festival and people didn't like what I said. And as I was leaving, some of the young people gathered around my car and they thought it was being mild, but they were jostling the car and booing and jeering. And as this man said this, I thought, I think I was one of those young people. And I asked him, was this, this festival, this date and this place? And he said, yeah. And I had had such a strong sense of connection with those other people. I was deepening my relationship with religion, deepening my relationship with some friends, and this guy had said something that people didn't like, and I joined in in this display of jeering that 20 years later was still something that somebody else said was the most frightening experience of their life. It was a shock to me and it changed everything in that community mediation, for suddenly our past to be present in the room where we thought we were talking about what was happening now, but actually we were talking about much more than the Place Where We Are Right by Yehuda Amichai Translated by Stephen Mitchell from the place where we are right Flowers will never grow in the spring the place where we are right Is hard and trampled like a yard Both doubts and loves Dig up the world like a mole, a plough and a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood. So this is one of Yehuda Amachai's most famous poems. It's so short and brilliant and precise. He is probably the most famous Israeli poet of the 20th century. He was born in 1924 and he died in 2000, and he was celebrated the world over. This particular translation is by Stephen Mitchell. Yehuda Amichai's poetry is characterized by a kind of a style of language that takes really complex things and distills them into not simplistic but profoundly simple things, graspable images and metaphors that can be used for deep reflection on personal life, on political life, on differences, on arguments, on change, on love. And you see this profoundly here. If you read the poem, including the title, by the end of it, and it's such a short poem, you've said these words, the place where we are right three times in the title, in the first line, and then in the fourth line. The place where we are right flowers will never grow where we are right is hard and trampled. So what is the place that we are right? And what is the place of this title and this repeated refrain within the poem? And also, what's the emphasis? The place where we are right or the place where we are right, or the emphasis on the we? You could go through those six words and place emphasis and find extraordinary riches and a harvest of reflection. Partly what I think is so important in this is A, demonstrating the brilliance of Yehuda Amichai and Stephen Mitchell's translation, but B, that this is a poem, I think, that asks for reflection to say, where is it that I think I'm right and how much work am I willing to do to reflect on the convenience of that and to reflect on are there victims to the way that I think that I'm right? Are there victims created on the other side of that? The poem builds on the metaphor of land, the place where we are right. But then it goes alongside that. There's no flowers growing there in the spring. It's hard and trampled like a yard, and the place can be dug up like a mole, a plough. And then we also hear of the place where the ruined house once stood. So we see a landscape, a landscape for growth, a landscape for animals, a landscape for harvest, and a landscape for living. How is it that we're able to use this land as a metaphor for reflection? Yehudah Amichai had been born in Germany in 1924, like I said, and when he was 12, the family fled to Palestine. This was 1936. He'd grown up being called slurs in Germany and told because he was a Jew to leave and go back to Palestine. And then when they went, same thing, told to leave. He fought in the Second World War, and he fought for the creation and the protection of Israel. So he knew the hatred with which Jews had been treated in Europe as century after century unfolded, pogrom after pogrom, and the hatred that Israel faced too. And he wasn't a member of a political party, but he knew that poetry was political. And like all who love a thing best, he wasn't afraid of being critical, he said. He was afraid, though, of people who speak in absolutes. For him, it's a demonstration of loyalty to ask critical questions, as you see here in Doubts and loves dig up the world, the final stanza of this poem says, and it says, but doubts and loves dig up the world that. But there is an indication of some kind of change, some turn. How willing am I to allow both doubt and love to dig up the place where I'm right. Because to speak about the place where I'm right is to imply the place where other people are wrong. And there are things that I don't want to be wrong about. Hard won things. But I always feel in Yehuda Amachai's poem, what he's doing is saying, well, especially the place where it's convenient for you to be right. That's me projecting into it totally. But he was so intelligent about conflict. I think he's saying, in the place where you have privilege or in the place where you're frightened about acknowledging that you might be wrong there, allow both doubt and love to dig that up because something else might be there. It isn't to be groundless. It is to say that there might be another experience of land underneath your feet. It isn't to say you don't belong anywhere, leave, be gone. It is to say doubt and love are two things that can hold you. Love alone, I don't think is enough because it's easy to love something and nonetheless be violent in its name. This is about saying doubt and love. The doubt that says what if I need to pay attention to another point of view? How willing am I to ask myself a question that might mean that I have to stand on new ground, that I have to go a bit deeper, that I have to employ doubt and love and maybe even bring some of my loyalties into question in order to ask something that has a deeper integrity? I've spent so much time thinking about those last three lines of the poem. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood, like if it was. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the house once stood. It would almost make sense to say, oh, who lived there? But this is saying that the land has a memory of a ruin and that ruin has a whisper. What's interesting is that it isn't a shout that will be heard or it isn't a voice, it's a whisper, which is to say that you have to pay close attention. I love the depth to which this is saying. There is history upon history upon history. And you need to know the story. The whispers from the roof ruins as well as what came before. The ruins. Whose ruin is being referred to here? Everybody's perhaps the ruins of my own defensiveness, the ruins of my own rage. The ruins of the things that I refuse to acknowledge to be true because I said I'm willing to hurt this other grouping of people in order to justify the place where I'M right. These are the runes that have whispers in them. He's saying, perhaps these are the things that I need to listen to. But they're buried. He's in a certain sense saying, dig up the ruins, let the ruins speak. You have something to learn. It's a way of saying that the doubt that I had in myself of am I right? That there might have been something in there in the context of the power that I had and the power of denial. He's saying, you're going to have to listen to that. And doubts and loves will be the thing that do it. I love how trustful this is. He isn't saying, this is easy. This is not a poem that's saying, expose yourself to terrible harm or that says where after you've finally been able to make safety for yourself, go and make unsafety. What is being proposed, I think, is to say where it is that you have not been willing to examine the possibility that your power might be causing difficulty to people who are in the place that you say is wrong. You need to examine that power, and that will actually deepen your belonging rather than undermine it. So much of what we're looking at in this series of poems as teachers looking at conflict in the human condition, is about the possibility of change. And it's always easy, I think, to think, well, the other person on the other side of this won't change. And that might be true and understandable why you'd say that you might have been given little evidence. I always want to ask as well, though, other questions, am I open to change? And this poem of Yehuda Amichai's is a poem that considers the question of me being open to the possibility of change in myself, the possibility of a change, in a way, I think, change in the way I think about my own doubts, my own loves, what it is that grounds me. How can I go deeper? How can I learn more? It's not easy, but it is something that will cause a deeper sense of belonging if we can do it. The Place WHERE We ARE RIGHT by Yehudah Amachai Translated by Stephen Mitchell from the Place where we are right Flowers will never grow in the spring the place where we are right Is hard and trampled like a yard but doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plough and a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood SA.
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The Place where we are Right comes from Yehuda Amichai's book, the Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Thank you to University of California Press, who gave us permission to use Yehuda's poem, read it on our website at. On Being. Additional support for this mini season of Poetry Unbound comes from Civic Building, Communities of Civic Empowerment, Quiet Listen and Finish Listening, and the Hearthland foundation, committed to justice, equity, and connection, one creative act at a time. Poetry Unbound is Gautam Srikishan, Eddie Gonzalez, Lucas Johnson, Kayla Edwards, Tiffany Champion, Cameron Musar, and me, Chris Heagle. Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions. This podcast is produced by On Being Studios, which is located on Dakota Land. Open your world to poetry with us by subscribing to our Substack newsletter. You may also enjoy Padraig's book poetry unbounding 50 poems to open your world. For links and to find out more, visit poetryunbound.
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Org. This podcast is produced by On Being Studios in Minneapolis, Minnesota.