SOURCE: "Motor Car, Bomb, God: Israeli Poetry in Translation," in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 309-28.

In the following essay, Whitman discusses Israeli poetry in English translation.

Israeli poets live in a world of extremes, of constant military threat and political uncertainty, in a country where centuries of religious conflict have been concentrated in an area not much larger than Rhode Island, an area no bigger on the map than the paring of a fingernail. Throughout the history of Hebrew poetry, biblical Hebrew has been its chief foundation. In every period and place, during the past twenty-three hundred years, Hebrew poetry picked up local influences, but the language remained unified because, since the beginning of the Diaspora, Hebrew was not spoken. It was kept apart from ordinary life as a written language only. But since the end of the nineteenth century, with the resettlement of Jewish...