As translator Micha Meyers told us before we started, this poem was published in an issue of the Hebrew magazine Helicon themed around the question ‘what is a poem?’ So it can be read as a kind of ars poetica – an exploration of what a poem is for Batsheva Dori.
To this end, the poem has at its heart the image of a postcard. Although postcards are in one sense a private conversation intended for someone specific, they can be read by anyone who handles them, and are not the place for something very private. There’s also a pun here, as Micha pointed out. For Hebrew speakers, postcards always carry the sense of openness because the Hebrew word for ‘open’ has the same root as the Hebrew word for ‘postcard’. The first line reads in Hebrew ‘I will talk with you openly’ (suggesting ‘postcard’) and the second line makes that clearer: ‘that is to say I will be a postcard’. We decided to swap these images around for our translation, to begin with the image that runs through the poem.
There are two other intertextual references later in the poem. First, to the biblical Song of Solomon (8:7), which in the King James version reads: ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.’ Dori has it ‘many words will not quench [truth]’, which we phrased in order to stay as close to the King James in English as possible.
And lastly, of course, the final lines reference the ‘swearing in’ of the title, alluding to the oath in court to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. We played around with Dori’s subversion of this for a while, which has the sense of ‘everything that is near the truth but isn’t true’. We landed pleasingly on ‘everything at the edges of the truth’, bringing back the idea of the perforated edges of a stamp on a postcard.
This was a really satisfying, witty poem to translate together – we hope you enjoy our rendition of this poetic meditation. If you’d like to share your version of ‘I swore myself in’, answers on a postcard please.
Helen Bowell, Poet Facilitator