Visit Of The Queen Of Sheba Poem by gershon hepner

As gifts to Solomon the Sheban Queen
brought lavish presents, Cushite gold
and precious stones and incense, clearly keen
to prove that she would not withhold
her treasures from a monarch who had built
his reputation on his wis-
dom, and a temple expiating guilt,
thus offering herself as his,
not sacrifice upon a temple altar,
but partner in his bed.
We see the gospel writer subtly alter
the story when he writes instead
of three wise Zoroastrian priests who bring
gold, frankincense and lots of myrrh,
with which they please the child who would be king,
mere infant to whom they defer
as if he’d been anointed over all
the Jews, like Solomon or royal
David, from whom we recall,
the infant to whom they are loyal
may be related. I can, with my sage eye
see a difference. Solomon
loved queens, and had no need for Magi,
because without them he had won
worldwide acclaim for wisdom. Though the child
whom the three Magi honored may
have been as wise, he never was beguiled
by women like the King. They say
he even turned away from God,
to have their love, less strange, more human
than that child in the manger who, most odd,
some have conflated with the numen.



Inspired by Robert Alter’s critical review in the TNR, December 31,2008, of a biography of his friend, the great Israeli Poet Yehuda Amichai (Nili Scharf Gold, “The Making of Israel’s National Poet”) . Alter cites a poem by Amichai which he translates, following the translation with an explanation that proves that Amichai’s poetry makes rich use of Hebrew wordplay which is impossible to translate and could not possible derive from his familiarity with German, contrary to the claim of Nili Scharf Gold. He writes:
Not only is this extravagant inference wholly undemonstrated, but a close reading of Amichai's brilliant stylistic achievement readily shows, in one instance after another, that he constantly exploited the intrinsic properties of the Hebrew language––its associative richness, its layered past, the play of overlapping sounds it enabled, the distinctive expressive possibilities of its syntax, grammar, and linguistic registers. That is why Amichai is hard to translate, even as his poetry gives the illusion of being altogether accessible in translation. To imagine that all this wonderfully resourceful use of the Hebrew language is 'in some way' ultimately a stand-in for an invisible German original strains credence to the breaking point.
Alter proves his point in an analysis of Amichai’s poem “The Visit of the Queen of Sheba”:
Amichai was often melancholy in his poems, but he was also an extraordinarily playful poet––sometimes even in poems with very somber themes. His humor, his delight in language, his zest for experience: all are significant elements of the distinctive allure of his poetry, and all are conspicuously absent from Gold's book. I will offer just one counter-example to the portrait of soul-wounding displacement and constant disguise that she presents: the fourth poem in a sequence of eight titled 'The Visit of the Queen of Sheba.' Astoundingly, Gold, pursuing the biographical fallacy with a vengeance, takes the prominence of a sea voyage in this cycle of poems as evidence that 'the pain of immigration and the memories of a traumatic voyage underlie all these segments.' It is mystifying how she could discover pain in the carnivalesque joyfulness of this poem, or personal memory in a fantastic narrative set in the time of Solomon.
Here is what the poetry actually sounds like (the translation is mine) .
Fish blew through the sea
and through the long anticipation. Captains
steered by the map of her longing and the rings of her belly.
The nipples of her breasts went before her like spies,
Her hair whispered together like plotters.
In the dark corners between sea and hull
the counting began, silently.
In the constant trill of her blood
a solitary bird sang. Rules fell
from the books of nature. Clouds were torn up like contracts.
At noon she dreamt
of sex in white snow and egg-yolk dreams
and yellow-wax pleasure. All the air was pressed
to be breathed in her. The sailors called out
in the language of foreign fish.
But beneath the world, beneath the sea
were musical notes as in chanting the Bible.
Everything sang each other.
This exuberant, erotically charged voyage northward through the Red Sea manifestly has nothing whatever to do with the flight by steamer of the Pfeuffer family from Venice to Haifa. The untrammeled playfulness of poetic imagination here shows not the least trace of an experience of traumatic displacement. One might note, for example, the extravagant comic image of the Queen of Sheba's nipples erect with anticipatory arousal, going before her like the spies in the Book of Numbers who were sent ahead to scout out the Promised Land. The seascape of the poem is not in any way threatened by a murderous regime but, on the contrary, is a world in which everything sings to each other; and in a characteristic enlisting of imagery from the realm of the sacred for the profane, underneath the world are cantillation markings, ta'amei neginah, like the ones under the Hebrew text of the Prophets that guide the chanting of these texts during Sabbath and holiday services.


12/27/08