SOURCE: "Toward a Tragic Wisdom and Beyond," in Kenyon Review, Vol. X, No. 1, Winter 1988, pp. 132-39.

In the following review, Irwin praises the poems in Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai but questions the publisher's decision to have the poems retranslated.

Toward the end of Camus' novel La Chute (The Fall), in which the narrator Clamence rambles on in a drunken soliloquy, we are told: "Pour que la statue soit nue, les beaux discours doivent s'envoler" (For the statue to stand bare, the fine speeches must take flight). The narrator's plight, one in which speech embellished with exaggeration and lies prolongs a hypocritical life, becomes a metaphor for the predicament of language in a postmodern era. One might argue that there are two types of language: one which attempts through excess to conceal emptiness, and the other which through reduction attempts to embrace all that is absent, and which...