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When Yehuda Amichia and Dahlia Ravikovitch died in 2000 and 2005, respectively, they were known in Israel and around the world as two giants of modern Hebrew letters.

Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, who together translated Amichai's book, "Open Closed" and the recently published "Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch," discussed the challenges of translating these two Israeli poets into English at Rutgers University March 24.

"For many readers, he is one of the great poets of our time, an essential poet," Bloch, a professor emerita of English and creative writing at Mills College in Oakland, said of Amichai, whose work has been translated into 37 languages.

Ravikovitch published her first collection of poetry in 1959, at the age of 23, and is considered by many, Bloch said, as the "greatest Hebrew woman poet of all time."

"No other Hebrew poet, except for Yehuda Amichai, has been so universally praised by Israelis whatever their ideological leanings are," Bloch said.

"Despite the 12 years between them, their different biographies, their different writing styles -- you'd never mistake an Amichai poem for a Ravikovitch or vice versa," Kronfeld, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at University of California at Berkeley, said. "To some extent they share a generational sensibility."

This "generational sensibility," Kronfeld explained, is partially found in the poets' rejection of strict dichotomies, and their efforts to locate, as Amichai put it, "the narrow interims."

Amichai's poetic philosophy, Kronfeld suggested, was "his concern with undoing all the distinctions that are based on black and white; either Jew or Arab; either man or woman; either us or them. This is basically his enemy and that he shares with Dahlia Ravikovitch."

While the two poets both repudiated such "strict and narrow distinctions," each approached the divine from a different vantage point.

For Amichai, Kronfeld said, "god is a literary character. It's part of the Hebrew language. It's part of the Jewish textual tradition. It's not part of a belief system."

In his poetry, Amichai is "invested in domesticating the divine and elevating the mundane," she said.

This can be seen, for example, in his poem "And That Is Your Glory," where he inverts the traditional prayer recited during the Days of Awe that expresses the greatness of God to instead refer to "the greatness of mundane love and in particular that of a flesh and blood woman."

Kronfeld said that she is surprised how Amichai, outside of Israel, is seen as "a card-carrying religious poet."

"Amichai is by no means the sweet singer of Israel that is packaged and sold around the world. Many English readers remain unaware of the ironic tone and critical edge in his use of religious discourse," she said, noting the way he uses religious language is obvious to Israeli readers.

Yet, unlike some other atheistic poets, Amichai wrestles with questions of the divine in the way other religious poets do, she added.

"Amichai's quarrel with the god he does not believe in has the feel of a family argument with intimate love and anger enmeshed," Kronfeld said. "The god of his disbelief is literally, biographically the god of his father and because he loves his father, he cant even hate the god he doesn't believe in."

Ravikovitch, who came from a religious family where she was immersed in traditional Jewish texts, also engaged sacred texts in a secular context, but was more concerned with Jewish ethics than questions of god and the divine.

In her poem "Beheaded Heifer," for example, Ravikovitch alludes to the biblical commandment to help even the animal of one's enemy in a poem about the true story of a yeshiva student who was shot in Hebron and left to die because no one knew who he was; the Jews assumed he was an Arab, and the Arabs assumed he was a Jew.

Her use of traditional Jewish ethics and its relationship to the contemporary world is found throughout her poetry, Kronfeld said. Bloch and Kronfeld spoke about the challenge of translation and the way they approach the problems inherent in this pursuit.

"One of the interesting things happening in the academic study of translation is that we're trying to get beyond the metaphors of the trail of fidelity that we commonly use in talking about translation -- Is it faithful to the original or not faithful to the original? -- and rather look at it as one form of interpretation," Kronfeld said.

Though Block and Kronfeld said that they seek to be as literal to the text as possible, they acknowledged that it is important to recognize the limitations of this approach.

"Translation and interpretation are the same thing in the Jewish tradition and they don't even claim to be faithful," Kronfeld said. "They sometimes need to be fanciful in order to shake meaning loose."