Shimon Adaf

And for a long time. His first poems were published in literary magazines when the writer was twenty. A founding member of the literary group Ev, between 1996 and 2000 he studied at Tel Aviv University and wrote articles on literature, film and rock music. From 2000 to 2005, Adaf served as chief literary editor for the Keter publishing house. The author of three books of verse and ten novels, including science fiction, a genre rare in Hebrew, he has translated Philip K. Dick’s The Man in The High Castle into Hebrew.

Adaf currently heads the Creative Writing Program at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and teaches in the new Jewish-Arab Culture Studies program there. Despite his interest in roots, Adaf warns against reliance on strict identity politics, in a recent Haaretz interview with Gili Izikovich:

“Suddenly everyone [in certain Israeli literary groups] is saying […] ‘You call me primitive? [Well] that’s my identity.’ There is no thought given to exceptions, or change, and [this vacuity] has become a literary construction. There is no self-criticism, but merely a pronouncement about the self. What once constituted parody [...] is now what literature wants to be – stereotypical.”

In Adaf's newest book of literary essyas, Ani Aherim (I, Others), Izikovich writes, he discusses

"those who would seem to be quite different from him – Aharon Appelfeld and Lea Goldberg, Yakov Shabtai and Avot Yeshurun, Hedva Harkavy and Yoel Hoffman and Yair Garbuz – and ends the book with an essay about himself and writing and its place in his life. Someone whose work is considered a fascinating labyrinth, whose readers have, hopefully, emerged from the other side and understood where they have been, attempts to dismantle structures and identities, to examine an Israeli nature different from his own, as a critic from the outside".

Almost from the start, in his early poem RESCUE FROM OBLIVION, Adaf appears to be saying that identity is not wholly dependent on the past:

I’m thinking

that I’ve reached
the end of history.

Not in the meaning of philosophy. There, reason knows itself

fully actualizing phenomenon as an idea. No. In a simpler sense

history ceases to be

essential for definition...
                                          [Tr. Becka Mara McKay]

The 2017 winner of the Hebrew University's prestigious Newman Prize for Literature, Adaf has been awarded the Ministry of Education Award (1996), the Prime Minister’s Prize (2007), the Yehuda Amichai Prize for Poetry (2010), and the Sapir Prize for his novel Mox Nox (2013). New English translations of his work appear in the May 2018 Bellingham Review. Books of his poetry are forthcoming in French, English and Spanish. 

Shimon Adaf was a guest of the Poetry International Rotterdam Festival in 2001.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry in Hebrew
Ha-monolog shel Iqarus (Icarus’ Monologue). Tel Aviv, Gvanim, 1997.
Ma she-xashavti tsel hu ha-guf ha-amitti (What I Thought was Shadow is the Real Body). Jerusalem, Keter, 2002.
Aviva-no Tel Aviv, Dvir, 2009.
Literary Criticism in Hebrew
Ani,aherim Tel Aviv, Dvir, 2018

Forthcoming in translation
French
Les Editions Caractères publieront en septembre 2018 son premier livre de poésie, traduit par Michel Eckhard Elial, « Le monologue d’Icare »
English
Aviva-no  tr. Yael Segalowitz, Farmington, Maine, Alice James Books, 2019.
Spanish
Aviva-no Trilce Ediciones, Mexico City

Books in English translation
Sunburnt Faces (novel) tr. Margalit Rodgers and Anthony Berris, UK, PS Publishing 2013
Art & War: poetry, pulp and politics in Israeli fiction (essays) ed. with Lavie Tidhar, NY, Penguin Random House, 2016

LINKS
Poems in Hebrew and German on Lyrikline

In English
A podcast on TLV 1
An interview in Tablet
Ishmael, a short story
Jewish Book Council interview
Review of Sunburnt Faces
Essays by/about the poet in BGU Review



Sponsored by POETRY PLACE