As I was driving the car to my usual Friday morning supermarket visit, I was listening to the weekly culture program on the Israeli public radio station. It was raining cats and dogs, the puddles were large and murky. I usually don’t pay much attention to these programs, and resort to my MP3 collection. But this time, the anchor was talking about a very special poet. Natan Yonatan. And as the song was playing, I was remembering the privilege of having met this very special and kind man. It was back in 1999. My family and I were in Tucson, Arizona, and Natan Yonatan was invited by the UJA (United Jewish Appeal) to participate in an evening in his honor and read some of his poems.
Being really good friends with the UJA representatives in Tucson, we met with Natan Yonatan before the event, during the event, but what was most exciting, we joined him for dinner. He was an older man, certainly over seventy at the time. He was an accomplished poet. Some say too accomplished, in that many of his poems were composed and performed by leading singers and bands. He was a very down to earth person. He spoke about his family with longing, about his work with passion. He was a great man, who somehow managed to play his greatness down in the presence of ordinary people like us. When we asked him to autograph his poem book for us, he blushed. The book is one of our prized possessions. As a man of words myself, I can say that if I compare his work to mine using terms from the transportation world, then if I could drive a tricycle, what Natan Yonatan was able to fly a spaceships… And even that, I guess, would be complimenting myself…
The song playing on the radio today is named “Like a Ballad”. Ballads are poems that end tragically. This one, though suggests that it is “like” a ballad, as the end is in fact, happy. The Hebrew words far exceed the English ones in the way the strike raw nerves. Here are both, the original (Hebrew) and the translation (English).
אם זר קוצים כואב
זה מה שאת אוהבת
אלך אל המדבר
ושם אלמד לכאוב
ואם שירים אהבת
רק שכתובים באבן
בין הכפים אגור
ובסלעים אכתוב.
ואז כשנתכסה
עם החולות בחושך
וספר הדברים
בחושך יתכסה
תגידי לי מילים
יפות מבכי ואושר
הוא כנראה אהב אותי,
האיש הזה.
If a painful bouquet of thorns
is what you love
I will go to the desert
and there i will learn to suffer
and if you love the songs
only written in the stone
I will live in the cliffs
and shall write in the rocks
and then we shall cover
with the sands in the darkness
and the book of Deuteronomy
in the darkness will cover
you will tell me words
more beautiful than sadness and happiness
he probably loved me
that man
As for me, I would change the very last verse of the poem to say “he most certainly loved me, that man”…
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