In his essay, “The Desire to be Gisella,” Grossman ponders the root of our fear of the “other” in ourselves and in those we love, and he thinks of authorship as a mad rebellion against this fear.

Text

David Grossman, “The Desire to be Gisella.” Writing in the Dark, Essays on Politics and Literature. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

This week, Marcela takes a step back from the literature itself to look at the language of the words we use. The idea of the podcast, Israel in Translation, is that the works discussed were written originally in a language other than English—indeed, in the writer’s native language. But one of the realities of our age—or rather—one of the realities of literature—is that often poets and writers do not write in their first language. Or, if they do, this first language is not the language of the culture in which they find themselves.

Marcela revisits the Granta Hebrew issue of the Ilanot Review to talk about Dory Manor’s The Language Beneath the Skin: A Meditation on Poetry and Mother Tongues.

Text

Dory Manor. “The Language Beneath the Skin: A Meditation on Poetry and Mother Tongues” translated by Mitch Ginsburg. The Ilanot Review.

On this episode, Marcela reads an excerpt from Yaniv Iczkovits’s novel The Slaughterman’s Daughter: The Avenging of Mende Speismann by the Hand of her Sister Fanny. It is translated from the Hebrew by Orr Sharf.

The protagonist of this book is the titular character, Fanny Keismann, who leaves her home and her wonderful husband, a cheesemaker, and their beloved children, to find her sister’s husband. Adventures and misadventures ensue.

Text

The Slaughterman’s Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits. Translated by Orr Sharf. Maclehose Press. Quercus, 2020.

For this Yom Kippur, we read a section of S. Y. Agnon's Twofold translated by Jeffrey Saks.

Text:

Twofold, by S. Y. Agnon, trans. Jeffrey Saks, in The Outcast and Other Tales. Toby Press, 2017

Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the ten days known as the Days of Awe. Today we feature works by Yehuda Amichai and Ibn Gavirol fitting of these Days of Repentance.

Text:

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015.
Vulture in a Cage. Poems of Ibn Gavirol. Translated by Raymond P. Scheindlin. Archipelago Books, 2016

Music:

Exploring the Convoluted Singularity by OKAM vs ps

Next week, from Sunday night until Wednesday at sunset, we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish New Year. This year, Marcela focuses on the figure of Isaac, son of Abraham, because the Torah readings for both days of the holiday focus on Sarah’s conceiving and giving birth to Isaac, Hagar’s banishment into the desert, and also on the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah.

Text:

Amir Gilboa, “Isaac,” translated by Arieh Sachs in The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, ed. Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, et. al.
“Sarah Laughed Again,” and “Isaac in Reverse” from Twenty Girls to Envy Me. New and Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, translated by Marcela Sulak. University of Texas press, 2016.
“Hagar” by Yocheved Bat-Miriam, translated by Zvi Jagendrof, in The Defiant Muse. Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Shirly Kaufman, et al. The Feminist Press, 1999.

Music:

Avinu Malkeinu by Barbara Streisand
Avinu Malkeinu (feat. Maria Katz) by Andrey Makarevich & Евгений Борец
Avinu Malkeinu by Lior

Previous Rosh Hashanah Episodes:

2017 https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2017/09/20/fear-and-glory-rosh-hashanahs-unetanneh-tokef/
2016 https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2016/09/28/hava-pinhas-cohen-poems-for-the-month-of-elul/
https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2016/10/05/poems-for-rosh-hashanah-and-yom-kippur/
2015 https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2015/09/16/blowers-to-the-shofar-souls-to-the-firing-line/
https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2015/09/09/free-admission-to-rosh-hashanah/
2014 https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/09/17/rivka-miriam-on-asking-forgiveness-israel-in-translation/
https://tlv1.fm/arts-culture/2014/09/24/haim-gouris-piyyut-for-rosh-hashanah-israel-in-translation/

Today we feature poems translated this past spring and summer by some of Marcela's translation seminar students at Bar-Ilan University. After studying and discussing various translation theories, and becoming familiar with different poetic traditions and styles, these graduate and undergraduate students chose a poet and translated their work.

The poems in this episode were translated by Aya Abu Riash, Yavni Bar-Yam, and Hiba Jiryis.

Text:

“Bigger Than All Words” by Nizzar Qabbani, translated by Aya Abu Riash

“The Big Billybong” by Roy “Chicky” Arad, translated by Yavni Bar-Yam

“A Prayer to the New Year” by Fadwa Tuqan, translated by Hiba Jiryis

This episode features a short story written by Sheikha Helawy, a Bedouin woman living in Jaffa. The story, published on the Short Story Project, was originally written in Arabic and was translated by Basma Ghalayini.

Helawy was born in the unmarked Bedouin village of El-Roi, on the outskirts of the city of Haifa. Helawy currently works as a supervisor and advisor at the Institute for Democratic Education in Israel. Her Arabic-language publications, published in Amman, Jordan, include two books of short stories, as well as a book of poetry. Her work has also been translated into French, German, and Hebrew.

Text:

Sheikah Helawy, “R.A. Looks for His Eyes,” translated from Arabic by Basma Ghalayini.

David Avidan was born in Tel Aviv where he lived and worked as a self-described “poet, painter, filmmaker, publicist, and playwright.” He studied literature and philosophy during a short stint at Hebrew University.

Avidan was often attacked by poetry critics who criticized him as being egocentric, chauvinistic, and technocratic. In an interview, he proclaimed: “My arena is the entire planet. Israel is but a small piece of land. I don’t work in Tel Aviv. I work from Tel Aviv.”

The poems read in today's episode are translated by Tsippi Keller, from the new collection Futureman.

Text:

David Avidan, Futureman translated by Tsippi Keller, introduced by Anat Weisman. Phoneme Media, 2017.

Roy Hasan was born in 1983 in Hadera, Israel and is the author of two collections of poetry – The Dogs that Barked in our Childhood were Muzzled (Tangiers, 2014) and Golden Lions (Tangiers, 2016). 

Michele Rosenthal translated several of Hasan's poems and says of Hasan, “He challenges the cultural gatekeepers to look beyond the traditional topics, tropes and metaphors toward a different, more inclusive version of Hebrew poetry that reflects the lived experience of those that have been traditionally left outside of the canon.”

Text:

Roy Hasan, If There’ll be Peace all the Arsim will Come, translated by Ron Makleff

Roy Hasan, “The State of Ashkenaz,” and “Four in the Morning,” translated by Michele Rosenthal

Music:

Yemen Blues - Tonight I'll Be Pretty Ft. Mariem Hassan

Natan Zach was born in 1930 in Berlin, and he immigrated to Haifa in 1936. He has had a great influence on the development of modern Hebrew poetry as editor and critic, as well as translator and poet. 

In an article from 1959, Zach favored ‘a “poetics of modesty”: simplicity in theme, syntax, and diction; understated rhetoric, avoidance of symbolistic intricacy, and flexible rhyme patterns; metrical and rhythmic structures that follow and reflect the flow of conversational language, refraining from lofty, elevated, cerebral, and flashy poetic devices and structures while employing irony in a subtle, distilled fashion; in short, an appealingly simple poetics without undue simplification.

Text:

Peter Cole: Hymns and Qualms. Selected Poems and Translations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Adi Keissar, an Israeli poet of Yemenite descent, is the founder of the popular Ars Poetica, a project which initiated a new wave of Mizrahi poetry for the masses in the form of readings combined with Middle Eastern music and dancing. Keissar received the Bernstein Literary Award for her first book Black on Black (2014), and the Ministry of Culture Award for Young Poets in 2015. She is the editor of two Ars Poetica anthologies, and former editor of the Basta poetry section of the online journal Ha’okets. Her second collection of poetry, Loud Music, was published in 2016. Keissar’s poetry has been translated into eight languages and has been published in various anthologies, journals and newspapers. In autumn 2015, Ha’aretz named her the most influential of contemporary poets.

Text:

Adi Keissar reading “I’m the Mizrahi”

“I'm the Mizrahi”

Adi Keissar reading “For Those” with subtitles

“Black on Black” by Adi Keissar, translated by Ayelet Tsabari

“A Man sets himself on fire” by Adi Keissar, translated by Ayelet Tsabari

“Woman of her words” by Tamar Lafontaine

Music:

Wamid by Yemen Blues

Baraca by Yemen Blues

Yemen Blues by Yemen Blues

Today we focus on the work of a particular translator—Peter Cole. We've often featured Cole’s translations, but almost always his work from antiquity, particularly from The Dream of the Poem, and also his Arabic language translations of Taha Muhammad Ali. But Peter Cole also translates from the twenty and twenty-first centuries, and today we'll feature a selection from his anthology, Hymns and Qualms, New and Selected Poems and Translations.

Text:
Peter Cole: Hymns and Qualms. New and Selected Poems and Translations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017

Today, Marcela finishes the three-part series on Ayalet Tsabari’s wonderful memoir, The Art of Leaving, with her favorite thing: cooking! This episode unveils the secrets of Tsabari’s family kitchen. You’re going to want to take notes for this one!

Text

Ayelet Tsabari, The Art of Leaving. Harper Collins, 2019

Asenath Barzani, from the Iraqi Kurdistan region, was the first known woman rabbi in Jewish history. Born in 1590, she was the daughter of the eminent Rabbi Shmuel b. Netanel Ha-Levi of Kurdistan. Her father, a scholar and mystic with a large following, aimed to rectify the plight of his brethren, namely, the dearth of educated leaders. He built a yeshiva in Mosul where he hoped to train young men who would become community leaders and scholars. Since he had no sons, he trained his daughter to be a learned scholar of the highest order.

After Asenath's father died, her husband technically became the head of the Yeshiva, but in fact it was Asenath who taught the students who had come for rabbinic training. But she also wrote poetry in Hebrew and was famous for it. Today we'll spotlight some of her poetry.

Text:

Asenath’s Petition, translated by Peter Cole in The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, and Tamar S. Hess. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.

The Kurdish Project

Music:

Kurdit by Reuven Yamin

On the shores of Israel's Sea of Galilee lies the city of Tiberias, and in Shemi Zarhin’s novel Some Day, it is a place bursting with sexuality and longing for love. Zarhin's hypnotic writing renders a painfully delicious vision of individual lives behind Israel's larger national story.

The air is saturated with smells of cooking and passion. Young Shlomi, who develops a remarkable culinary talent, has fallen for Ella, the strange neighbor with suicidal tendencies; his little brother Hilik obsessively collects words in a notebook. In the wild, selfish but magical grown-up world that swirls around them, a mother with a poet's soul mourns the deaths of literary giants while her handsome husband cheats on her both at home and abroad.

Shemi Zarhin was born in Tiberias in 1961, and is a novelist, film director, and screenwriter who has created some of the most critically acclaimed and award-winning films in the history of Israeli cinema, including Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi (2003), Aviva My Love (2006), and The World is Funny (2012). He now teaches filmmaking at the Sam Spiegel School in Jerusalem. Some Day is his first novel and was a best-seller in Israel.

Text:

Some Day by Shemi Zarhin. Translated by Yardenne Greenspan. New Vessel Press, 2013.

Music:

Etz Ha'Alon by Yehoram Gaon

Baladah LaChovesh by Yehoram Gaon

People are people. But sometimes it is difficult to maintain one’s humanity under dehumanizing conditions. On today’s episode, we share the work of one poet in Gaza whose poems and fragments open a tiny window into the Gaza strip, where only 5% of the water is potable, there is electricity for 5 hours a day, and only 55% of the population is employed. His name is Mosab, and he has created the Edward Said Library for Gaza.

“When a writer is motivated by empathy rather than sarcasm, his humor has the power to reach deep into the heart,” Omri Herzog noted in his 2012 Haaretz review of Yirmi Pinkus' second novel, Petty Business, which is a tale of two families, related by marriage, who are shop owners in 1980s Israel.

The content is daring and unusual—middle-aged, petit bourgeois families are not the usual protagonists of Israeli literature, but Pinkus, who is also a graphic artist known for his humor, delivers a strangely compelling story. Marcela reads a section from near the beginning, in Yardenne Greenspan and Evan Fallenberg’s new English translation.

Text: Petty Business by Yirmi Pinkus. Translated by Evan Fallenberg and Yardenne Greenspan. Syracuse University Press, 2017.

This episode features poems by Sheikha Helawy, a Bedouin-Israeli woman living in Jaffa, originally written in Arabic and in Hebrew and translated by Yosefa Raz.

Helawy was born in the unmarked Bedouin village of El-Roi, on the outskirts of the city of Haifa. Her village was destroyed in 1990 by the Israeli government. Helawy currently works as a supervisor and advisor at the Institute for Democratic Education in Israel. Her Arabic-language publications, published in Amman, Jordan, include two books of short stories, as well as a book of poetry. Her work has also been translated into French, German, and Hebrew.

Text: Four poems by Sheikha Helawy, translated by Yosefa Raz.

Music: Aman Demeysin by The Bridge Project

Moshe Sakal’s novel, The Diamond Setter, is part mystery, part family history, and part myth. The plot centers around a lost blue diamond known as Sabakh that is brought into the local diamond cutter’s shop. The story is told mainly from the point of view of shop owner’s nephew and assistant, Tom, who, with his boyfriend Honi, becomes romantically involved with a young man from Damascus who may or may not be connected to the diamond.

Text:
Moshe Sakal, The Diamond Setter. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Other Press, March 2018.

This past Saturday night, we celebrated the holiday of Shavuot. And in honor of the festival, we read from Emuna Elon’s novel, If You Awaken Love, translated by David Hazony, and published by Toby Press in 2006.

Music:

Kululam - Chai

Rav Shlomo Carlebach - Pe'er Vekavod Notnim Lishmo

Text:

If You Awaken Love, Emuna Elon, translated by David Hazony, Toby Press, 2006

In honor of the holy month of Ramadan observed by Muslims worldwide, host Marcela Sulak reads an essay by Iman Jmal, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University. Jmal is from Jatt in northern Israel and she writes about preparing a Ramadan meal with her mother, the shopping for which they must travel through a checkpoint.

Music:

Approaching the Bridge – The Bridge Project

Notre Wagon – The Bridge Project

This week’s podcast features Ilana Kurshan’s memoir If All the Seas Were Ink. Originally written in English, the text translates the study of the Daf Yomi, or “Daily Page,” of the Talmud, into a life story. The Talmud is the main book of rabbinic teachings spanning about 600 years. It is the basis for all codes of Jewish law. The memoir begins in the wake of a painful divorce, when Ilana decides to begin this 7 ½ year long study, one page at a time.

More info on Bar Ilan's Writing Conference.

Text: Ilana Kurshan, If All The Seas Were Ink. A memoir. St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

In this episode we read from David Grossman’s “Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel”, translated by Haim Watzman. The narrative that Grossman records are the words of Aouni Sbeit.

Text: David Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire. Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. Translated by Haim Watzman. Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux. 1993

Music: My White and Brown Land by The Bridge Project

In her introduction to Vaan Nguyen’s collection, Adriana X. Jacobs writes, “Nguyen’s poetry may circulate in the Anglophone literary market as part of an increasingly visible Vietnamese literary diaspora… And yet, introducing Nguyen’s poetry to the Anglophone reader needs to account for the particularities of the Vietnamese experience in Israel without letting it entirely overshadow her work.”

Between 1977 and 1979, approximately 360 Vietnamese refugees entered Israel, and of that number, about half left for the United States or Europe. Those who stayed were able to apply for Israeli citizenship, take on jobs, start families, and continue with their lives. 

Nguyen’s parents were among these refugees. She was born in Ashkelon, Israel in 1982, one of five daughters. The family moved around and eventually settled in Jaffa Dalet, a working-class—and largely immigrant and Arab—neighborhood that is part of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality, “not the pastoral tourist part, but the section that is far from the sea,” Nguyen explains.

Text

The Truffle Eye, Vaan Nguyen. Translated by Adriana X. Jacobs. Zephyr Press; Nov. 2020

Previous Episode on Vaan Nguyen’s Work

https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2017/04/26/sitting-with-strangeness-a-conversation-with-adriana-x-jacobs/

In continuation of the celebrations surrounding Israel’s Independence Day, host Marcela Sulak reads from Amos Oz’s iconic description of the events surrounding the struggle for Israeli independence.

Text:
Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness. Translated by Nicholas De Lange. Harcourt, Inc., 2003.

Music:
Ofra Haza – Eli Eli (lyrics by Hannah Szenes)
City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra – Hatikvah

This episode originally aired April 23, 2015.

Tonight marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. Moving past all the euphoria and towards attempts at wisdom, this episode will feature excerpts from the essay “The Meaning of Homeland” by Amos Oz, found in the collection “Under This Blazing Light,” translated by Nicholas de Lange.

Text: Amos Oz, “The Meaning of Homeland” in Under This Blazing Light translated by Nicholas de Lange, Syracuse University Press, 2995.

Music: Canvas (Instrumental Version) by Imogen Heap

Previous Independence Day Episode: A Night to Remember on the Road to Independence

In honor of Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel - host Marcela Sulak reads poetry by Paul Celan, including his famous “Death Fugue.”

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Czernowitcz in 1920. The death of his parents in the Holocaust, and his imprisonment in a Romanian work camp are the defining forces in his poetry and use of language. Celan wrote in German. According to Pierre Joris, who translated Celan’s later poetry, he “harbored feelings of intense estrangement from the language and thus set about creating his own language through a “dismantling and rewelding” of German.”

Texts:
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. W.W. Norton & Co. 2001
Poems of Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Persea Press, 1995.

Music:
Felix Mendelssohn - Prelude & Fugue in E Minor, op.35 no.1
Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, op.19 no.6 in G Minor
Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, op.30 no.6 in F Sharp Minor

In honor of the seven (or eight) days of Passover, which began on Saturday night, we will continue reading the work of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, whose novel Jacob’s Ladder was featured two weeks ago for its reference to Palm Sunday.

This week features the essay “To Die a Modern Death,” which is often used as a text on bereavement in Israeli nursing schools. It is not an easy text, but it is a very important one for those caring for aging family members, especially during the holidays.

Text: “To Die a Modern Death” by Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Translated by Hannah Schlit. In Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books, 1006.

In honor of the beginning of Passover this weekend, this week's episode features an excerpt from S.Y. Agnon’s story, “The Home,” which appears in Herbert Levine and Reena Spicehandler’s English translation in Jeffrey Saks’ series on Agnon, the only Hebrew-language writer to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Text: “The Home,” by S. Y. Agnon, translated by Herbert Levine and Reena Spicehandler, in The Outcast and Other Tales. Ed. and annotated by Jeffrey Saks. Toby Press, 2017.

In honor of Palm Sunday, this episode features an excerpt from Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's Jacob's Ladder. Born in Cairo in 1917, the author depicts life in Egypt between the two world wars in the novel, which was published in 1951, before she settled in Israel.

Here is an excerpt from the novel:
Miss O’Brien had felt the child’s hand stiffen in hers, and Rachel’s unseemly interest in the beggar boy moved her. The child might be loved and spoiled, but she must be unbearably lonely if she cared for such a dirty little scamp. At first when everything in Egypt was strange, new, and often shocked her, Miss O’Brien had followed Alice’s instructions and the advice of other nurses that children must be kept away from all that smacked of native life, but now this seemed cruel to her.

Text: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, from Jacob’s Ladder in Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing. Ed. by Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights, 1996.

This episode features segments from the book Jerusalem Stands Alone by Mahmoud Shukair, a collection of tales narrated in a series of stand-alone observations, usually no more than a single page, and often simply a paragraph, so that they resemble, in a way, the tenants of a house or the apartments of a neighborhood. Nicole Fares has translated it from the Arabic.
Mahmoud Shukair was born in 1941 in Jerusalem and worked for many years as a teacher, journalist and editor-in-chief of the cultural magazines Al-Talia'a (The Vanguard) and Dafatir Thaqafiya (Cultural File). He was jailed twice by the Israeli authorities for his political remarks, and was deported to Lebanon in 1975, not returning to Jerusalem until 1993. He is the author of 45 books, six television series, and four plays, including Mordechai’s Moustache and His Wife’s Cats. In 2011, he was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Prize for Freedom of Expression. He has spent his life between Beirut, Amman, and Prague and now lives in Jerusalem.

Here is an excerpt from "Neighbors":
Her name is Suzanne. She’s a thin blonde from Marseille who rented a room in the Old City, where she shares a bathroom with her neighbors, a bathroom she uses once in the morning and again around midnight.
Her window overlooks a house occupied by five settlers who appear on the porch every morning. She can see the top of the pale yellow wall not far from the house. (Suzanne loved this city from the moment she arrived last years.)

Text: Jerusalem Stands Alone by Mahmoud Shukair. Translated from the Arabic by Nicole Fares. Syracuse University Press, 2018.

In honor of the Purim custom of reading the Book of Esther, this episode features an excerpt from Ruth Calderon's short story "A Bride for One Night". It is the title story in her collection of Talmudic tales, published in Ilana Kushan's English translation in 2014. Calderon has a doctorate in Talmud from Hebrew University and was elected to the Israeli Knesset in January 2013. She is founder and former director of Elul Beit Midrash in Jerusalem and founder and chair of Alma: Home for Hebrew Culture in Tel Aviv.

The story opens with a Talmudic passage:

When Rav would visit the city of Darshish, he would announce: “Who will be mine for a day?” And when Rav Nachman would visit the city of Shachnetziv, he would announce: “Who will be mine for a day?”

Text: Ruth Calderon, A Bride for One Night. Talmudic Tales.

Translated by Ilana Kurshan. The Jewish Publication Society, 2014.

Music: משירי ארץ אהבתי“ (לאה גולדברג / דפנה אילת) בביצוע חוה אלברשטיין”

Ruby Namdar's second novel, "The Ruined House", appeared in its English translation in 2017. Set in New York, the book centers on an esteemed professor. It is uncannily timely in that it dovetails with the #MeToo movement and the close scrutiny that the film industry, media, sports, academia and politics are undergoing right now for their participation in systemic sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination.

Here is an excerpt form the novel:

Cohen specialized in elegantly naming his courses, which attracted students from every department and were always fully enrolled. It was more than just their names, though. His courses were well conceived and well rounded. For all their incisiveness, their main strength lay in the aesthetic harmony of their superbly formulated interpretative models, which were easy to understand and absorb. In general, “elegant” was the adjective most commonly applied to anything bearing the imprint of Professor Andrew P. Cohen.

Music:
Demian by Tatran

Text: Ruby Namdar, The Ruined House. Translated by Hillel Halkin. Harper Collins, 2017.

This podcast is devoted to the poetry of the Jerusalem Light Rail. Each of the 23 stops of the Jerusalem Light Rail's red line features a poem, translated into Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Some of the poems depict bodies in a state of fatigue, as if coming home from work during a daily commute. And some of them are about travel, and the tiny details of it -- construed in a metaphysical as well as a physical sense. The beauty of the project is the insinuation that we travel via language, as well as via train, through landscapes, and through bodies, as in Samih Al-Qasim’s poem “Rain on the Newsstand,” translated from the Arabic by Idan Barir.

Here is "Rain on the Newsstand" by Samih Al-Qasim:

Sudden rain pouring on the morning papers
rain,
the ink flows from language to language
the mannequin’s features fade away from the cover
as does the face of an athlete proud of his trophy
the eyeliner melts in an actress’ eyes
the bloody red oozes
and wounds open
on the opinion page
the small newsstand shuts its doors
rain,
on the last issue.

Music:

רכבת לצפון - אסף אמדורסקי
רכבת לילה - משינה

Have you seen the Crazy House on HaYarkon Street in Tel Aviv? It’s a highrise that looks like pink cement, with some metallic puffed cream lobbed at the front of it? Or at least that’s how it seems to Marcela.

It used to look that way to the poet Lali Tsipi Michaeli, as well. Michaeli says “fear is what I felt as a child every time I drove with my parents in a car on Hayarkon Street. As the car was about to reach the “crazy house” (I called it the “scary”), I hid on the back seat floor and closed my eyes tightly. The house troubled the girl I was. Over the years it has become a Tel Aviv landscape and I have always had a certain aversion to it, a kind of traumatic childhood memory.”

Text

The Mad House by Lali Tsipi Michaeli, translated by Michael Simkin. Adelaide Books, 2020.

Previous Episode with Lali Tsipi Michaeli

Haim Gouri, the last poet of Israeli’s founding generation, died one week ago today. He wrote of the terrible sacrifice of war, and of memory and camaraderie.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1923, Gouri was a poet, novelist, documentary film maker, journalist, and the author of a book on the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann.

During World War II, Gouri joined the elite strike force of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force operating during Mandate Palestine, called the 'Palmach.' He was sent to Hungary to help holocaust survivors come to Palestine.

Gouri's first book of poetry, published in 1949, was heavily influenced by his experience in the Palmach during the war of 1948. His later books become more abstract.

Today's episode features poems from the volume Words in My Lovesick Blood, translated by Stanley Chyet.

This is an excerpt from the poem "Account":

And again, as always in the Land of Israel, the stones boil,
earth gives no cover.
And again my brothers call out from the depths.

Texts:

Haim Gouri, Words in My Lovesick Blood, translated, Stanley Chyet, Wayne State University, 1996.
Poems translated by Linda Zisquit and T Carmi: Poetry International Rotterdam

Previous podcast: 

Haim Gouri’s Piyyut for Rosh Hashanah

Music:

רונה קינן - אני גר כעת בספר ישן

עינב ג׳קסון כהן - עקרתי אל עיר אחרת

ארז לב ארי - אולי זו רק פתיחה למשהו אחר

Author and playwright Nava Semel passed away in December 2017. Her novel "Paper Bride" paints a vivid portrait of British Palestine in the 1930s, seen through the eyes of an illiterate boy.

Here is an excerpt from the novel:
And so, dear children, we repeat the question. What does your family do for the homeland? Herzl Fleisher stood up first, followed by other pupils, all of them describing how their fathers or their uncles or other people they knew were active in the defense of Jews in Palestine or had devoted their lives to building the country. But I hadn’t lied. My big brother Imri really did go to Poland to get married for the homeland.

Text:
Paper Bride by Naveal Semel. Translated by Sondra Silverston. Hybrid Publishers, 2012.

Previous podcast:
And The Rat Laughed: Remembering Writer Nava Semel

Music:
שלמה ארצי – באיזשהו מקום

Peter Cole is a poet and translator who has recreated Spain's golden age of Jewish culture and adapted tenth-century Arabic-language poetry to 21st-century English so skillfully that the lines sing.

This episode features translations from Cole's new book Hymns and Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations, which features poems originally written in Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic, alongside Cole's new poetry.

Here is an excerpt from the poem "Blessed Are Those" by Avraham Ben Yitzhak, translated by Cole from the original Hebrew:

Blessed are those who sow and do not reap—
they shall wander in extremity.
Blessed are the generous
whose glory in youth has enhanced the extravagant
brightness of days—
who shed their accoutrements at the crossroads.

Text:
Hymns and Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Music:
Etti Ankri – Mi Yitneni
Etti Ankri –Avdei Zman
Etti Ankri –Yefe Nof

Novelist and playwright, Nava Semel, passed away in December 2017. There are writers that you plan to read and never do, and then, when they pass away, you regret not having read them in their lifetime. Nava Semel is one of these writers.

Her work was the first to address the topic of the so-called “Second Generation”— children of Holocaust survivors. And The Rat Laughed is a five-part novel dealing with the horrors of the Holocaust and the influence of this harrowing chapter of human history; on humanity’s relationship with God; on the understanding of human nature; on the need to forget in order to survive; and on the need to remember, nonetheless.

Here is an excerpt from the novel:

If you were going to hand me over to strangers, why did you bring me into the
world?

Where is “there”?

Who’s going to help me with my homework “there”?

Whose bed will I go to “there”?

And who will be with me “there”?

Who else will be “there”?

Why isn’t “there” here?

Text:
“And The Rat Laughed” by Nava Semel. Translated by Miriam Shlesinger (Hybrid Publishers 2008)

Links:
The Sound of Her Steps
The One Facing Us: Ronit Matalon’s Family Album
Tale of Two Friends: “Bliss” by Ronit Matalon
In Memory of a Life: Aharon Appelfeld’s “The Story of a Life”

Music:
שלמה ארצי – בגרמניה לפני המלחמה

The acclaimed and prolific Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld passed away last week at the age of 85, leaving behind 47 published works. This episode honors his legacy with excerpts from his memoir, entitled The Story of a Life.

Here is an excerpt from the memoir:

After the Sabbath meal, we take a stroll to the stream. Grandfather and Grandmother walk ahead, and we follow behind them. At night this branch of the river looks wider. The darkness sinks, and white skies open above us, flowing slowly. I stretch out my hands and feel the white flow coming straight into my palms.
“Mother,” I say.
“What is it, my love?”
The words that I had sought to describe the sensation have slipped away from me.
Since I don’t have words I sit there, open my eyes wide, and let the white night flow into me.

Music:

Little Bird (Instrumental) by Imogen Heap

Ronit Matalon's Bliss: A Novel revolves around two friends: Sarah, a politically active photographer, and Ofra, a selfless graduate student. The story is told in flashbacks as Ofra is summoned from Tel Aviv to a provincial township near Paris for a funeral. While there, Ofra, and we, the readers, learn about the collapse of Sarah's marriage.

Here is an excerpt from the novel: 

Sarah closed her eyes in surrender to the music. “It really is unlike anything else,” she said.

Michel and I exchanged glances. She was completely tone-deaf and couldn’t tell the difference between the theme song from the nightly news and Bruce Springsteen, a
Hebrew folk song and the overture to Don Giovanni. She heard it all as one cacophonous mess.

“It’s because she has so much inner noise,” Michel explained.

On one of his previous visits a few years earlier, he had accepted an invitation to join her on a tour of Gaza and had endured Channel 2 and Army Radio the whole way.

Text: 

BLISS. By Ronit Matalon. Translated by Jessica Cohen. New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company, 2003.

Previous Podcasts: 

The Sound of Her Steps
The One Facing Us

Music: 
How Deep Is The Ocean - Meredith D'Ambrosio
It Might As Well Be Spring - Meredith D'Ambrosio
Throw It Away - Abbey Lincoln
Giant Steps - Meredith D'Ambrosio

We end 2017 with an infusion of religious, secular, biblical, and sensual registers and sensibilities as we enter the poetic world of Esther Ettinger, curated through the translations of Lisa Katz. The Jerusalem-born Ettinger is the author of five books of poetry, two novels, and a monograph on the Israeli poet Zelda.

Text:
“Elisha,” translated by Vivian Eden,” “Dynasty” translated by Lisa Katz, “History II,”and “When I Brought You,” translated by Rona May-Ron.

See also: Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry by Israeli Women Writers, edited by Miriyam Glazer. SUYNY Press, 2000.

Music:
כל יום מתחילה שנה – עפרה חזה
Axcik Girl – The Bridge Project
בית הבובות – שנה חדשה

Host Marcela Sulak reads from a folkloric-infused story by the Jerusalem-born writer Dan Banaya-Seri, in which a simple Jewish man uses his minimal understanding of Christmas to try to make sense of his marital obligations.

Text:

“Birds of the Shade,” by Dan Banaya-Seri. Translated by Betsy Rosenberg. In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing. Ed. Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books. 1996.

Music: 

Silent Night by George Martinos

Birds Chirping by Alexander

In honor of the beginning of Hanukkah, host Marcella Sulak reads Etgar Keret’s story “Childish Things”, translated by Sondra Silverston, which takes place during the holiday.

Excerpt:

When Lev heard that he couldn’t burn the curtain, he burst into tears and claimed that in kindergarten, they said that every day you have to light a curtain and eat eight jelly doughnuts. My wife still tried to argue that the only things that gets lit are candles and the exact number of jelly doughnuts to be eaten isn’t specified in the holiday manual. But her flimsy arguments shattered on the armor of our pyromaniac son’s
terrifying determination.

Text:
“Childish Things” by Etgar Keret. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Tablet Magazine.

Music:
Al Hanisim by Izhar Cohen
Banu Hosheh Legaresh by LeHakat HaKesher HaVirtuali
Ma’oz Tzur by Yosef Karduner

In Yehudit Hendel's story "The Dancer", the narrator talks about life, death, and God with a barefoot man dancing in a park.

Hendel was born in Warsaw in 1926 to a Hasidic family. In 1930, her family immigrated to Israel, and her first stories were published in 1942. She emerged as one of the first female voices in Hebrew literature after Israel's independence in 1948.

Text:
“The Dancer” by Yehudit Hendel, translated by Miriam Schlusselberg

Yishai Sarid’s The Memory Monster takes the form of a report by the narrator, a young Israeli Holocaust scholar, written to his superior from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, and raises ethical questions about the struggle to cope with the memory of the Holocaust.

Text

Yishai Sarid. The Memory Monster. Translated by Yardenne Greenspan. Restless Books, Sept. 2020.

Tuvia Ruebner is a poet who was born was born in multi-ethnic Bratislava, Slovakia in 1924 and received permission to enter British Mandate Palestine in 1941. To this day, he translates his work into German, and all of it has been published in Germany. In Hebrew, he is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry, two photograph albums, and a monograph on the poetry of his close friend, writer-scholar Lea Goldberg, as well as other literary criticism and translations.

Text:

Tuvia Ruebner, Late Beauty. Translated by Lisa Katz and Shahar Bram. Zephyr Press, 2017.

Previous episode of "Israel in Translation" featuring poems by Tuvia Ruebner.

Tamar Merin is a writer, critic, and literary scholar. In her story “What Are You Looking At?”, the prosaic act of a mother and son going for ice cream becomes an exploration of the anxiety of immigration, the shock of living in a new land.

Text:
“What are you Looking At?” by Tamar Merin. Translated by Ari Leiberman.

Sharon Hass's poems draw on mythical images and on philosophy, reflecting her academic background. Many of her pieces dance on the border between reality, legend and dream, while frequently alluding to figures known from ancient mythology and world literature.

Music:
Lonely Arcade Man – Diamond Estate
The Video Within – Diamond Estate

Text:
Poems by Sharron Hass, translations by Amalia Ziv, Vivian Eden, Lisa Katz.