A voice from the “sealed carriage” (on interpretation of Dan Pagis’s poem “Footprints”)

Abstract

The article attempts to interpret Dan Pagis’s poem “Akevot” (“Footprints”), one of the most interesting, albeit little studied, works of Hebrew poetry of the second half of the 20th century. The poem is included in the poetry collection Gilgul (“Metamorphosis”), which contains all Pagis’s texts devoted to the Jewish Holocaust (these texts, among other things, reflect the personal memories of the poet, who in 1941–1944 was a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp in Transnistria). The perspective of the interpretation is set by the situation metaphorically denoted in the poem as a “sealed carriage”, indicating, on the one hand, accidental salvation from death, and on the other hand, abandonment, “oblivion” in the concentration camp space. Being “forgotten in a sealed carriage”, the character feels that he is both alive and dead at the same time. His existential position usually defined by Pagis’s researchers via the expression “met hai” (“dead alive”), is considered to be the initial basis of the witness’s mission, interpreted, according to Giorgio Agamben, as an “impossible” mission, since it demands that the witness should take the view of those who died, and therefore can no longer bear witness. The subject of this testimony is rather not a memory of past events and conditions, but the very image of a person who, being not able to break out of the “sealed carriage”, is enclosed in it forever. © 2020 Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of RAS. All rights reserved.