The Roads Taken

Standing in the wood-paneled library at the Yaddo Writers and Artists Retreat on a rainy day in the fall of 1989, I idly browsed the eclectic collection of books that had been placed there by former residents of this haven where solitude, natural beauty, and creature comforts have coaxed the best out of generations of artists.(The book was, as I recall, The Window, translations with Ariel Bloch of Dahlia Ravikovitch's poems.) I picked it up and started reading, now in earnest.[...]most of our encounters were on the page, as I pored over Chana's translations of Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai, which she did with her namesake and soul sister Chana Kronfeld, and of the Song of Songs with her first husband, Ariel.[...]as Chana's own poetry began to accumulate, I came to realize that at nearly every turn in my own life, she had been there just before me and had managed to craft those intersections into magnificent verse: in divorce, in "late love" and remarriage, in the efforts to create something new and beautiful out of the fragments of our parents' (and then our own) broken and reconstituted lives, in our desire to transmit our secrets and struggles to our children in ways that would enable and not cripple them: I wanted to save the two of you from the misery that filled our house.