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Yehuda Amichai's newest volume of poetry, "Open Closed Open," is as earthy, visual and slightly unsettling as the talmudic tract on birth that inspired the name: "When the fetus comes forth into the air of the world, what is closed opens and what is open closes."

Two accomplished poets and literary experts from Berkeley, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, translated the book, which they describe as the magnum opus of an internationally celebrated literary giant.

Amichai, Israel's candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, was born in Germany in 1924 and immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1936. His work has been translated from Hebrew into 37 languages. "Open Closed Open" was published in Israel in the spring of 1998.

"His poems are so full of life that we would begin talking about life," said Bloch, director of the creative writing program at Mills College. "We'd realize we had stopped translating and just started talking…It shows how emotionally engaging the work is."

The women will offer a taste of Amichai's blend of biting irony, playfulness, piercing insight and depth of emotion in a series of Bay Area readings in May.

Distilling the "exceptionally vibrant" work into English took 2-1/2 years "of very intense work," Bloch said.

"What's difficult about translating Amichai is paradoxical," said Kronfeld, U.C. Berkeley professor in the comparative literature and Near Eastern studies departments. "It seems a poet who is so immersed in his own culture…should be difficult, but he is miraculously accessible in translation."

Kronfeld and Bloch have an advantage in translating, however: Each has known Amichai, who is too ill to travel, for many years.

"It was wonderful to translate his work with the sound of his voice in our ears," said Bloch. "It made the whole process of collaboration a joy." That "Chana's first language was Hebrew and mine English was an advantage," she added.

Many translators continue to base their interpretations of Amichai on the English, rather than the original Hebrew, version. "God knows he's had his share of awful translations," said Bloch.

His work is peppered with eclectic Israeli cultural references. It took the Israeli-born and raised Kronfeld to pick up the numerous cultural allusions.

"We're not just translating from one language to another, we're translating from one culture to another, and those cultures are not congruent," Bloch said. "There are huge gaps. Chana would say, 'Oh, this is a cabaret song from the '50s, or 'This is a joke,' or 'This is a funny song, let me sing it for you.' Israelis get the irony. The Americans take him straight. One of our projects is to restore his saltiness."

Americans, they say, can connect to the depth of human feeling in the work.

"He's one of the juiciest poets alive," said Bloch. "He's able to really give expression to the deepest human conflict — pain, joys."

In fact, Amichai has avoided making the kinds of academic references that would go over the heads of readers, the women said. That the work is rich with sensory imagery also helps make it so accessible, said Bloch.

Take the poem that begins with the line, "Twilight sobs down the side of the gray house and is consoled."

How did the women settle on "sobs" rather than the prettier "weeps," for instance?

"In Hebrew there are many words for crying," Kronfeld said. "There are about 30 for poverty. This word means the kind of crying where you make a lot of noise. The Hebrew word here is mitiapaya, a very emphatic but not sweet word — what you do when you feel like a lost child. It doesn't have the crispness of 'cry.' The result is visual and auditory. We would keep a running commentary on how a literal translation just doesn't work."

They also had to consider maintaining the integrity of sound pattern.

A choice example is "The Chimp of Chance." In Hebrew, the alliteration rolls off the tongue like a lemon soufflé.

But the poem translated into chunks of cold potato: "I am the puppy of fate, a glutton for fate, I dwell in fate, I am a resident of fate."

"If you translate it literally, you lose all the sparkle," Bloch said. "I remember the afternoon we did this one. We had a thesaurus open and a dictionary on the table."

The result: "I am the chimp of chance, the champ of chance, the chum of chance and the chump of chance."

Amichai was unaware of the recrafted line when the poem appeared in The Nation, Bloch said: "A friend telephoned him and said, 'I read your poem about the chimpanzee.' Amichai said to his wife, 'Did I ever write a poem about a chimpanzee?'"

Then there's the electric "An Ideal Woman."

I know a man who put together an ideal woman

from all his desires: the hair

he took from a woman in the window of a passing bus,

the forehead from a cousin who died young, the hands

from a teacher he had as a kid, the cheeks from a little girl,

his childhood love, the mouth from a woman he noticed

in a phone booth, the thighs

from a young woman lying on the beach,

the alluring gaze from this one, the eyes from that one,

the waistline from a newspaper ad.

From all these he put together

a woman he truly loved. And when he died, they came,

all the women — legs chopped off, eyes plucked out, faces slashed in half, severed hands, hair ripped out, a gash where a mouth used to be,

and demanded what was theirs, theirs, theirs

dismembered his body, tore his flesh, and left him

only his long-lost soul.

In Israel, the piece would generate shock waves and "immediately be understood in the context of the religious debate," Kronfeld said. In the United States, it speaks of "the way commercial culture collaborates with misogyny to objectify women."

"I've never seen a man, let alone an Israeli man, talk about what that does to a woman, a dismemberment," she said. "In Israel it would be much more shocking, the surreal onslaught of dismembered furies."

For a celebration of Israel Independence Day on the eve of Yom HaAtzmaut at San Francisco's Congregation Emanu-El, they've chosen poems "that show what is it to be an Israeli in all its complexity,"

For a reading at Easy Going Travel in Berkeley, they've selected Amichai's poems about journey and place.