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Welcome to Israeli poetry - May 2004

18 januari 2006
These web pages focus mainly on poetry by living Israeli writers, while earlier poets whose influence is still felt in modern Hebrew literature are also represented. The present edition marks 15 months of Hebrew poetry on the PIW site. Following {id="3182" title="Yona Wallach"} and {id="3172" title="Meir Wieseltier"}, identified with a particular moment in the development of Israeli poetry, this edition offers the work of three poets whose overlapping lives sprawl over a century: Avoth Yeshurun, Nurit Zarchi and Shimon Adaf. The writing of previously featured poets, and articles about their lives and work, remain accessible in the PIW archives.
The beginning of Hebrew poetry is recorded in the Bible, whose very first book refers to the primordial Garden of Eden. This is the place where humankind was born: the cradle of human culture. The first verses treated as poetry by the biblical writer are these:

Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
You wives of Lamech, hearken to what I say:
I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.
If Cain is avenged sevenfold,
truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.

(Genesis 4:23-24)

Hebrew poetry has come a long way since then, built block by block, the two verses above joined by the poetry of Moses; and of Deborah; David’s lament for Jonathan; and the psalms, hymns and chapters of the Prophets, sounding a call for social justice. After biblical poetry came the writings of the rabbinical sages; the poetry of the Middle Ages; of the Enlightenment; the beginning of modern Hebrew poetry; and the work of contemporary Israeli writers.

The poets featured in the sixth edition represent three completely different directions in Hebrew poetry. As a matter of fact, they represent three different generations, and their usage of the language, their aesthetics and sense of beauty as well as their thematic focus have very little in common.

{id="3160" title="Avoth Yeshurun"} was born in 1904 on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement; his first book appeared shortly after the birth of Nurit Zarchi, and he died a few months after Shimon Adaf's poems first saw print. Yeshurun is one of the greatest poets of Tel Aviv and the new Land of Israel, built upon the sands. Yeshurun's modernist Hebrew language represents the times he lived in, cut off from his European family, first by immigration and then by the Holocaust. It mixes the sacred tongue with the profane, the everyday language of the first city of the new Hebrew – jumbling together Yiddish, Arabic and the neologisms of the poet, who was good at combining the original with the old, new and foreign in his poetic diction, as may be seen in the various and strange objects gathered in his poem {id="3316" title="The Collection"}. The present edition offers four of Yeshurun’s poems, from the English language edition of The Syrian African Rift in poet Harold Schimmel’s translation, and accompanied by Schimmel’s forward to the book and remarks by poet-translator Gabriel Levin on the occasion of Yeshurun’s last volume of poetry in Hebrew.

{id="3176" title="Nurit Zarchi"}, born in Jerusalem in 1941 and raised on Kibbutz Geva, is not only an excellent poet but also one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers for children and adults in Israel. In contrast to her work for children, always clear and deep, her first books of poetry for grown-ups were dense and hard to decipher. Over the last decade Zarchi’s poetry has changed direction and opened up; in translucent language, the rich world of this thinker-writer’s experience easily finds its way into readers’ hearts. At the same time, her fiction for grown-ups has appeared, winning her an enthusiastic and loyal audience. Three poems, translated by Lisa Katz and by Gabriel Levin, are offered here; in addition, a chapter of Zarchi’s memoir {id="3085" title="Games of Loneliness"}, about her uneasy childhood on the kibbutz, appears in Katz’s translation.

{id="3179" title="Shimon Adaf"}, born in the southern Israeli town of Sderot in 1972, is the youngest poet represented in this issue; he is a gifted musician, literary critic and editor in addition to being a talented poet and, despite his young age, has managed to make waves with his poetry and to reach a wide audience. Authentic and direct, his first two books depict both an urban and a human landscape. Free from romanticism, his poetry nonetheless contains emotion and an engaging intellectual tension. The sixth edition offers three poems, translated by Vivian Eden and by Gabriel Levin, plus {id="3102" title="remarks"} written by the editor of these pages on {id="3486" title="Someone writes about another"}. The Israeli national site is produced by {id="3098" title="Mishkenot Sha'ananim"} International Cultural Centre in Jerusalem.

{id="3083" title="Gabi Hadar"}, National Site Founder
{id="3083" title="Rami Saari"}, National Editor
{id="3083" title="Lisa Katz"}, English Language Editor
© Rami Saari
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