Autobiography by Dan Pagis
"Autobiography" is a poignant poem by Dan Pagis, a notable Israeli poet whose work deeply reflects his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Composed of twenty-six lines divided into six stanzas, the poem intricately weaves personal and collective identity through the lens of trauma and persecution. The speaker, who begins by declaring their own death, embodies not just an individual but represents the collective suffering of Jews during the Holocaust, echoing the story of Cain and Abel to symbolize victimization and betrayal.
Pagis employs rich biblical allusions, particularly to the Genesis tale, to explore themes of grief and remembrance, marking the historical context of Jewish suffering. The poem does not explicitly reference the Holocaust but alludes to its horrors through nuanced language and imagery, prompting readers to reflect on the ineffable nature of such atrocities.
Despite the overwhelming pain, the speaker asserts a resilient spirit, suggesting that the collective memory of victims continues to haunt their oppressors. Pagis's use of repetition and poetic devices adds layers of meaning, inviting readers to engage with the complex interplay of memory, identity, and survival. Through "Autobiography," Pagis contributes to the broader narrative of Jewish history, emphasizing the enduring impact of trauma while simultaneously asserting the strength of those who remember.
On this Page
Autobiography by Dan Pagis
First published: 1975, as “Ōtōbiyōgrafyah,” in Moah; English translation collected in Points of Departure, 1981
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“Autobiography,” a poem of twenty-six lines divided into six stanzas of four or five lines apiece, requires some knowledge of Dan Pagis’s biography. Pagis, a leading Israeli poet of his generation, was born in Radautz, in Romanian Bukovina (now Russia). A Jew, he was incarcerated for three years of his early adolescence in a Nazi concentration camp. At the age of sixteen, in 1946, Pagis, like many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, emigrated to Palestine. (The nation of Israel was officially established by the United Nations as a homeland for Jews in 1948.) His native tongue was German, and he learned Hebrew in order to assimilate into Israeli society. He began writing poetry in Hebrew in about four years; it is remarkable that he later became a preeminent poet—not to mention a respected scholar of the literature—in a language not native to him.
The first line of the poem establishes that the speaker is dead. Clearly, the poem cannot be an “autobiography” in a literal sense. When the reader considers the author’s biography, it begins to seem possible that the “I” who “died with the first blow” is collective rather than individual. The “I” in this poem symbolizes Jews murdered by the Third Reich’s diabolical “final solution” or perhaps, in a larger sense, all Jewish people who have endured persecution. The identification of the “I” with victimized Jews becomes stronger in the next stanza, in which the speaker reveals that he was murdered by a brother who “invented murder.” This brother is Cain, the slain speaker Abel, and the parents who “invented grief” Adam and Eve. The story of the first murder, from Genesis 4, here represents the brutal persecution of Jews, especially those murdered during the Holocaust.
If Abel is the world’s first murder victim, many others followed. The third stanza seems to make a leap forward in history to the twentieth century, when “the well-known events took place” and “our inventions”—presumably the elaborate death machinery systematically and efficiently employed by the Nazis—“were perfected.”
Abel continues reflecting on his death in the final three stanzas. He declines, in stanza 4, to “mention names,” the names of generations murdered after him; such “details,” he says, horrifying at first, are finally “a bore.” The suggestion is that human beings, the poem’s readers included, have a limited capacity for details of horror. Stanza 5 develops this idea further: “you can die once, twice, even seven times,/ but you can’t die a thousand times.” The narrator, however, does claim the power to die a thousand deaths, and his “underground cells reach everywhere.”
Neither of the brothers is mentioned by name until the sixth stanza, in which Cain’s name appears in the first line. Cain, the murderer, has multiplied “on the face of the earth,” while Abel, his victim, “began to multiply in the belly of the earth.” Victimizers proliferate and live; their victims’ bodies pile up in graves. Nevertheless, the speaker claims that his strength “has long been greater than” Cain’s. The poem concludes with an explanation and emotional assessment of why this is and how it feels: “His legions desert him and go over to me,/ and even this is only half a revenge.”
Forms and Devices
Pagis uses allusions to Old Testament myth in much of his work and alludes to the story of Cain and Abel, archetypes in the Judeo-Christian tradition for the victimizer and victim, in at least two of his best-known poems, “Brothers” and “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car.” Clearly, Pagis is using imagery from this archetypal murder metaphorically, and the most immediate comparison is to the Nazis’ murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.
The reader may well ask just how this is so clear. No details in the poem refer specifically to the Holocaust, or even World War II. Lines from stanza 3, “Our inventions were perfected. One thing led to another,/ orders were given,” contain the most direct references in the poem, and even these are oblique. Again, knowing the poet’s personal history is helpful, as is a passing familiarity with Pagis’s other work, in which the Holocaust is a persistent, although hardly omnipresent concern.
The very fact that Pagis refers to the Holocaust only indirectly—there are no swastikas, no images of crematoria—is in itself of interest. Pagis is a master of understatement, which is a form of irony; and irony is perhaps the dominant mode for serious literature written after the horrors of World War II. It is almost as if mere language were incapable of rising to the occasion of describing or paying appropriate homage to human suffering on a scale as vast as the Holocaust deserved. The German philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno wrote, “After Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.” Pagis wrote poetry, but the mask he wears as a poet is of one unable or possibly unwilling to give full voice to the incomprehensible suffering of millions.
This poem was originally written in Hebrew, a language richer than English in sound devices such as assonance and consonance. Although it would not have been possible for Stephen Mitchell’s translations of Pagis’s poetry to approximate the poet’s sense of sound play, Mitchell’s translations have been praised for their “resourcefulness and sensitivity,” and readers of Hebrew have admired how Mitchell captures Pagis’s sparse, elusive qualities in English.
One of Pagis’s poetic devices which Mitchell is able to incorporate is repetition. Lines such as “My brother invented murder,/ my parents invented grief,/ I invented silence” and “There were those who murdered in their own way,/ grieved in their own way” use repetition and, in the first example, parallel structure to give the poem an Old Testament flavor. If the Old Testament is the principal book of myth for Jews, this poem, alluding to the Old Testament both in its use of metaphor and through stylistic devices like repetition and parallel structure, serves as a fragment in the Jewish people’s continuing, modern saga—a story with the Holocaust persistently looming in the background.