Search Results for: poetry

Stuck on the Fence: Shahar Bram’s “North of Boston”

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Haim Watzman When I encountered Shahar Bram’s lyric “North of Boston” on the back page of Ha’aretz’s arts section last month, I was immediately struck by its plethora—celebration, really—of intertextuality and interlingual word play. A poem awash in allusions and puns that cross textual and linguistic boundaries is by definition impossible to render into any … Read more

The Poem as Translation–Leah Goldberg’s “About Myself”

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Haim Watzman It’s always easy to tear a translation apart, and the easiest kind of translation to tear apart is poetry. Vladimir Nabokov, who lived multilingually and thought a lot about translation, was one of the best, and funniest, critics of other people’s renditions of Russian classics into English—as can be seen now in his … Read more

Appraising God: Reading Psalm 146

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Haim Watzman A preview of a conversation I’ll be leading at an all-night Shavu’ot study session this evening—happy holiday to all. Ostensibly simple, theologically maddening, Psalm 146 is one of my favorite biblical poems—precisely, perhaps, because its ostensible simplicity is so maddening. And since it gets recited each day in the morning service, where it … Read more

Diplomacy By Other Means–“Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman To: His Excellency President Rufus T. Firefly From: His Notsogoodency Haim Watzman, Freedonian Ambassador to Israel As you will recall from my earlier report, this morning I was summoned urgently to the foreign ministry in The Capital That Must Not Be Named. (As you know, the ministry is actually located in Jerusalem, but … Read more

Rachel and Mt. Nevo–A Translation

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Haim Watzman I’m reading Rachel’s collected poems straight through for the first time. And being a translator (but not, I should emphasize, a poet), I can’t resist the temptation to try my hand at an English version of one. This is an ongoing project that I’ll be updating as I polish and improve it. I … Read more

Red Briefs and Rain Ink–“Necessary Stories” Column in The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman The dust rose so high to the sky that heaven and earth seemed to have reverted to a dull yellow primordial chaos. The engines of dirt-caked, drab army transports rumbled, the horns of master sergeants’ white vans honked. I stood, trying to be seen and heard, at the Fatma Gate in Metula, seeking … Read more

C.K. Williams Dusts It Again

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Haim Watzman Sorry to have been absent from the blog this week—I’ve been busy trying to keep up with the comments on Gershom’s South Jerusalem History Awards post, which has set an all-time SoJo record. Pretty interesting debate, too (although I encourage Suzanne, Charlotte, Raghav and the rest to count to ten before hitting the … Read more

A Time To Be Icky: Tisha B’Av and James Dickey’s “The Sheep-Child”

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Haim Watzman It’s summer and the Jews are being perverse again. Instead of singing of sand and sea, next week we’ll spend a day fasting and lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem. The lamentation lyrics get pretty sickening—blood flows, people get tortured and burned alive, famished women cook and eat their own children. Why do we … Read more

Dead Off: Hanoch Levin’s “Lives of the Dead” in English

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Haim Watzman My friend Atar Hadari’s translation of Hanoch Levin’s anti-epic poem “Lives of the Dead” provides a fine opportunity for English readers to make an acquaintance with an important but very frustrating member of the modern Israeli literary pantheon. Levin, who died ten years ago in middle age, made his major impact as a … Read more