Yehuda Amichai: "The two of us together and each one alone" (From Hebrew)

Here's a poem which I literally cannot read without crying (you can tell in the recording.) It's by Yehuda Amichai, a Hebrew author who drew material from every aspect of living Israeli language, be it fossilized biblical idioms, youth-slang, nursery rhymes, legalese, or popular songs- often mixing them together to invent new expressions, and sometimes even new registers of language to suit his needs, as he does in the following poem (published in 1955 in his first book). 

When he wrote this poem, Amichai had seen a great deal of combat both during WWII as a member of the British Army, and -more importantly- during Israel's War for Independence as a member of Palmach, the elite strike force of the underground Jewish army known as the Haganah. In addition to fighting the British, and protecting Jewish areas against Arab incursions, Palmach was also responsible for a great many violent and sadistic acts of ethnic erasure that left dozens of Arab villages in ruins, an unknowably high number of Arabs (civilians, combatants and everything between) dead, and hundreds of bright Zionist thinkers busy rationalizing the whole affair with half-truths and victim-blaming.

Even in poems as early as this, one can sense Amichai's nascent and prescient fear, in the face of continuing Arab-Jewish strife, that Israel was slowly being transformed into a permanent garrison state. But the poem is not a political commentary or lamentation. That historical, moral and biographical sensibility is fused with, and subsumed into, the grander theme of lost innocence, of a world without redemption and the futility of the rightly mocked notion that "all you need is love". 

The two of us together and each one alone¹
By Yehuda Amichai
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original in Hebrew

Look sweetie- one more summer's turned dark
And my dad hasn't come to the amusement park.
The swings keep swinging on their own.²
The two of us together and each one alone.

The horizon loses its ships off the shore.
Hard to hold onto a thing anymore.
The fighters waited behind the hill.
How much we need of mercy still!
The two of us together and each one alone.

The moon is sawing the clouds in two.
Let hand-to-hand love bring me against you.
We alone will make love where the two camps fight.
Perhaps we can still make everything right.
The two of us together and each one alone.
 
As the first sweet rain was once salt sea
So, it would seem, has my love changed me.
I am brought to you slowly, and fall. My dear,
Receive me. No angel redeems us here.
Because the two of us are together. Each is alone.

Notes:

¹- According to one of my Israeli correspondents, the refrain/title of this poem is taken from a lease contract. שניהם ביחד וכל אחד לחוד (literally "Both of them together and each one alone") is Israeli contractual language corresponding to the more opaque phrase "both jointly and severally" in English legalese (i.e. describing the liability of a husband and wife, both as a couple and as individuals, entering into a contractual obligation in common law legal systems.)

²- According to the same Israeli correspondent, the three opening lines in the original are an allusion to a children's song popular when Amichai wrote this poem, titled "אבאל'ה בוא ללונה פארק" Abaleh bo laluna park (Daddy, come lets go to the amusement park). To hear a recording of the song click here. The song's refrain runs thusly:

אבאל'ה בוא ללונה פארק
שם נחמד, עליז ונפלא
אבאל'ה בוא ללונה פארק
נתנדנד על הנדנדה


Daddy, come lets go to the amusement park
It's nice and happy and wonderful there
Daddy, come lets go to the amusement park
We'll swing around on the swings.

I compensated by translating the lines to also echo certain verses from Faith Hill's Butterfly Kisses Daddy's Little Girl and Glasvegas' Daddy's Gone.

The Original:

יהודה עמיחי
שנינו ביחד וכל אחד לחוד

ילדה שלי, עוד קיץ עבר
ואבי לא בא ללונה פארק.
הנדנדות מוסיפות לנוד.
שנינו ביחד וכל אחד לחוד.

אופק הים מאבד ספינותיו -
קשה לשמר על משהו עכשיו.
מאחורי ההר חכו הלוחמים.
כמה זקוקים אנו לרחמים.
שנינו ביחד וכל אחד לחוד.

ירח מנסר את העבים לשניים -
בואי ונצא לאהבת בינים.
רק שנינו נאהב לפני המחנות.
אולי אפשר עוד הכל לשנות.
שנינו ביחד וכל אחד לחוד.

אהבתי הפכה אותי כנראה
כים מלוח לטפות מתוקות של יורה;
אני מובא אליך לאט ונופל.
קבליני. אין לנו מלאך גואל.
כי שנינו ביחד .כל אחד לחוד.