Four boys, maybe five…

Four boys, maybe five, are shaking a car,
their faces distorted by the thrill of destruction.
Beneath its wheels lies an abyss.
Inside the car is your son.
The car tilts.
Desolation all around, desolation
within you and without trying you already know,
no voice will emerge from your throat.
What will you do?

Four boys, maybe five, are shaking a car,
under its wheels is an abyss.
The boy in the car is not your son.
Your son is outside with them,
his face distorted by the thrill of destruction.
What will you do?

This week, a new poem by the Israeli writer, Tal Nitzán (b. Jaffa, 1961) recalls a teaching-technique that readers might remember from school arithmetic questions, set in the form of a “problem” that invites various forms of logical calculation to find the answer. For school maths, there’s only one correct answer, of course, and only one chain of deductive methods. The problem Nitzán sets us is very different: it’s a moral one, and proposes two hypothetical situations, the second a reversal of the first. And the question is a direct moral challenge: “What will you do?”

The future-tense of the challenge implies the situations are more than hypothetical: they will shake our own lives one day. They’re described with present-tense immediacy. We’re shown the gang of youths, the car they are violently shaking, and the solitary boy inside the car. We see “desolation”, inward and geographical, blurred into one by the unpunctuated seventh line. This desolation contrasts with the boys’ faces, “distorted by the thrill of destruction”.

At the word, “abyss” in line three, a new dimension is added: what might have been simply a grim, but familiarly bleak urban scenario, “tilts” like the car, and the solid surface under its wheels falls away. We look down into the mouth of hell. In such a nightmare, the danger inherent in the failure to find the solution is dramatically increased, giving the question which ends both stanzas additional urgency. The abyss could also engulf anyone who tries to “do” something towards restraint and rescue.

The person pressured to do something is of course you, the reader – who is here a parent. In the first stanza, your son is the victim, in the second, one of the bullies. The repeated question “What will you do?” implies different answers. It’s up to you to work it out. You might feel more horror and more impetus to action at the sight of your own child in physical danger, isolated by the volatile metal capsule he’s inside. You might try to take on the gang yourself in your struggle to release the child. It would be a different emotion, repugnance as well as fear, if the child were one of the attackers. You might be more likely to try and use reason, to shout words as well as to scream and lash out in fury and fear. You might try negotiation, both with your son and with his cohorts. But, no, the poem has set you an additional problem: line eight has told you that you’re unable to speak.

The contemporary poem by its nature often poses questions, usually in a subtle or understated manner. Nitzán’s choice of the harder hit – stark images and stark questions – forces closure before resolution. There’s a political analogy here, perhaps, with the choice between fighting and negotiation. The recurrence of “the thrill of destruction” reinforces a truth beyond reason about violence.

A poem by Rachel Tzvia Back makes for relevant comparison. In the title poem of her collection What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking, Part III centres on a mother “who sent her son to war” or “didn’t stop her son from going to war”. She faces trial at the “High Court of Mothers held on full moon nights / At undisclosed Celestial sites …” and the poem concludes that “She, and the High Court, found her / There where lost and forever // Guilty.” The question here, “What will you do?”, might be to either parent, of course; the overriding demand is on the adult(s) in authority to bear the guilt. And those adults include us.

An award-winning poet whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages, Nitzán herself grew up in Colombia and Argentina as well as Israel and is a leading translator of Hispanic literature. Her own collections include Doméstica (2002), An Ordinary Evening (2006), Café Soleil Bleu (2007), The First to Forget (2009), and Look at the Same Cloud Twice (2012).

The English edition of her important anthology, With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry appeared in 2009, with translations from the Hebrew by Nitzán’s co-editor, Rachel Tsvia Back. The anthology features poems by Nitzán and many other significant and too-often neglected writers.

Nitzán’s English language collection, At the End of Sleep, appeared in 2014. This interview was published in 2009.

‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬