Ktivat-Adam (Homograph): Avot Yeshurun, the Long Poem, and Poetic Historiography

This essay explores how the long poem authorizes itself to reshape memory. I develop the notion of “poetic historiography” on the basis of Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) and by examining three mutations of Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun’s (1904–1992) long poems. In each of these hybrid forms, “poetry” is subordinated to testimony and to metahistorical communication, but at the same time, the long poem evolves as a mnemonic-poetic tool in which language changes its functions. Throughout, the central question is how and to what effect the “presence of an absent thing stamped with the seal of the anterior,” which Ricoeur regards as the enigma of historiographical transmission, is mediated by the temporal mode of poetry. My aim is twofold: first, to trace the change in Yeshurun’s long poems— from representing history as Bildung, through enacting testimony and (post)trauma, to the evolvement of the poetic archive; second, to explore to what ends these forms of memory that are shaped by poetry also forge its future transmission.