Exploring Israeli literature in English translation. Host Marcela Sulak takes you through Israel’s literary countryside, cityscapes, and psychological terrain, and the lives of the people who create it.
https://tlv1.fm/israelintranslation
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 1 day 20 hours 39 minutes
Desert flowers with deep roots
“... Hanging by a thread, my fathers jostle together, A sleeve of Hispania cloth permeated with the scent of jasmine On an austere robe from the lands of years gone by On a breeze bearing blows, payes and pelts…” So reads a section...
Israeli poetry's brightest flame
Tonight is Lag B'Omer, the Jewish holiday of light celebrated by lighting bonfires. Here's a glimpse of poet Agi Mishol's very own Lag B'Omer bonfire: You piss on my love as if it were a bonfire, extinguishing it ember by ember with the...
A desert oasis through the eyes of a blind poet
A few weeks ago, Erez Biton was awarded the Israel Prize for literature, becoming the first Mizrahi Jew to receive the prize. Of Moroccan descent, he was born in Algeria in 1942 and arrived in Israel in 1948 via France. After a joint reading...
A night to remember on the road to independence
We look at how Amos Oz, in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, describes what happened the euphoric night the UN voted to establish a Jewish state.
Maya Bejerano's poetry lab
My face is beautiful when I am understood, it expands to the size of a broad gate in hundreds of shades of color on the paper in the clay’s angles and cuts. These are the final lines of Maya Bejerano's poem "Data Processing 60,"...
Jewish travel: A Passover reading of Moses' personal memoir
If Passover is the defining Jewish holiday, then Yehuda Amichai is Israel's defining poet. Host Marcela Sulak reads some of his interpretations of the foundational Passover narrative, as we listen to music set to his words. In...
Mysticism, messianism, and divine music
I call you now to answer me despite my prayer’s silence in the mornings despite the moth’s presence in my closet despite my fullness with rusted talk These are lines from Haviva Pedaya's poem "When I Come From the...
David Grossman's echo of reality
"After we finished sitting shiva, I went back to the book. Most of it was already written. What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written."
The she-fox under the thornbush
According to Anne Lerner, the poet Esther Raab presented herself to her first readers in 1922 with the lines: I am under the thornbush Nimble, menacing, Laughing [at] its thorns To greet you I straightened up. At a time when Hebrew poetry by...
Verses from a Christian Arab village on the frontier
We met the Christian Arab village of Fassuta, on the north-western slope of Mount Meron in the Upper Galilee, in a previous podcast: http://tlv1.fm/?p=30469 Host Marcela Sulak takes us there again to discover the work of Nidaa Khoury, who was born in...