To appreciate what [Yehuda Amichai manages to do in Amen], one has to imagine him as the chief character in a drama—chief in the sense that he is the one on whom we see the drama registering all its pressures. In this case, his speeches have the added authority that the role is real, and the drama is that crucial hinge of modern history—particularly the history of the West—which is the dilemma of modern Israel. (p. 10)

The dramatic role which Amichai has had to perform obviously demands unusual linguistic resources, for any adequate expression. Luckily for us who cannot read the Hebrew, he did not rest content with purely verbal means. What he has in common with Herbert, Holub, and Popa, is a language beyond verbal language, a language of images which operates with the complexity and richness of hieroglyphs. But the images are not...