Sunday Sentence

In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

Poets come in the evening into the Old City
and they emerge from it pockets stuffed with images
and metaphors and little well-constructed parables
and crepuscular similes from among columns and crypts,
from within darkening fruit
and delicate filigree of hammered hearts.

Source: Yehuda Amichai, “Jerusalem, 1967” (trans. Stephen Mitchell), in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (edited by Robert Alter).

4 thoughts on “Sunday Sentence

  1. Clive Collins says:

    Beautiful, and that final line – “and delicate filigree of hammered hearts’ – passes beyond beautiful to a sensation I can perceive but do not know how to name.

    1. Erika Dreifus says:

      Clive, I am with you! I have to tell you, though, that Alter’s introduction to the volume so emphasizes the difficulties of translating Amichai “accurately” that I almost chose NOT to share this. But I figured that so long as I acknowledged Mitchell, it would be okay!

  2. Temima says:

    Thank you Erika!
    What an integration of the five senses, the mind, and spirit!
    Which poem is this from in Hebrew?

    1. Erika Dreifus says:

      The title is “Jerusalem, 1967,” in English, so I’m assuming it’s rather similar in Hebrew.

Comments are closed.