Return to Archive Index Number 285 May June 2000 Poetry Copyright © 2000 Poetry Flash I Saw Jasmine Blossoms YEHUDA AMICHAI Translated by CHANA BLOCH & CHANA KRONFELD Casual Hands, Brutal Stars, Past Things ELI COPPOLA

I Saw Jasmine Blossoms YEHUDA AMICHAI Translated by CHANA BLOCH & CHANA KRONFELD This poem is from "The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy: The Touch of Longing Is Everywhere," from Open Closed Open, translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. The three hundred poems in Open Closed Open, published in Israel in 1998, represent Amichai's magnum opus. Yehuda Amichai was born in 1924 in Germany and emigrated to Palestine with his parents in 1936. Widely considered to be Israel's foremost poet, his work has been translated into thirty-seven languages, including Chinese, Estonian, and Vietnamese. Open Closed Open is masterfully translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. They wrote about the process of translating Amichai in a recent American Poetry Review: "Amichai makes a virtue of accessibility. His poems are characteristically pitched in the accents of the ordinary person; his language is deceptively simple and direct…he employs 'only a small part of the words in the dictionary.'…it is the exceptional vividness and visual acuity of similes and metaphors that enable his poems to cross the language barrier. His images make poetry out of the non-poetic things of ordinary life." Chana Bloch is co-translator of the Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and the Song of Songs, and directs the Creative Writing Program at Mills College. An award-winning poet, her most recent collection is Mrs. Dumpty. Chana Kronfeld wrote about Amichai in On the Margins of Modernism. She teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley.

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BORN 0N NOVEMBER 13, 1961, Eli Coppola was a poet of turn-you-around wit, intelligence, anger, tenderness; she was truly a poignant talent. She died of a heart attack on April 2, her death a total surprise. Eli Coppola entered Bay Area poetry through the readings at Cafe Babar, the spoken word scene in San Francisco from the mid-eighties to the early nineties, the only poet there who could hold the crowd spellbound with poems of frailty and intimacy. In the last ten years, she had been invited to read at over fifty venues, including street fairs, battered women's shelters, academic conferences, workshops with the homeless and at-risk youth, and other readings in the Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, North Carolina, and the United Kingdom. She published five books of her poetry: The Animals We Keep in the City (Zeitgeist Press, 1989), Invisible Men's Voices (Blue Beetle Books, 1991), As Luck Would Have It (Zeitgeist, 1993&emdash;available from Zeitgeist Press, 1630 University Avenue #34, Berkeley, CA 94703), no straight lines between two points (Apathy Press Poets, 1993), and ANY WAY (monkey business books, 1999). She was previously the administrator for the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group on Women and Gender at UC Berkeley, earned her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University in 1994, and at the time of her death had been the business manager of The Poetry Center at SFSU for two years. We want to remember her the way poets should be remembered: Casual Hands, Brutal Stars, Past Things ELI COPPOLA From The Animals We Keep in the City, by Eli Coppola, Zeitgeist Press, Berkeley, 1989. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

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