Poet, philosopher, and sensitive misanthrope, a spectacular fly in the ointment of the refined eleventh-century Andalusian-Jewish elite, Solomon Ibn Gabirol comes down to us as one of the most complicated intellectual figures in the history of post-biblical Judaism. Unlike his worldly predecessor Shmuel HaNagid, the first important poet of the period, Ibn Gabirol was a reclusive, mystically inclined figure whose modern-sounding medieval poems range from sublime descriptions of the heavenly spheres to poisonous jabs at court life and its pretenders. His verse, which demonstrates complete mastery of the classicizing avant-garde poetics of the day, grafted an Arabic aesthetic onto a biblical vocabulary and Jewish setting, taking Hebrew poetry to a level of metaphysical sophistication and devotional power it has not achieved since. Peter Cole's selection includes poems from nearly all of Ibn Gabirol's secular and liturgical lyric genres, as well as a complete translation of the poet's long masterwork, "Kingdom's Crown." Cole's rich, inventive introduction places the poetry in historical context and charts its influence through the centuries. Extensive annotations accompany the poems. This companion volume to Peter Cole's critically acclaimed Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid presents the first comprehensive selection of Ibn Gabirol's verse to be published in English and brings to life an astonishing body of poetry by one of the greatest Jewish writers of all time.

"Israeli writer Shaham explores the beams and pilings of a special mode of Zionist life--that of the kibbutz--and, especially in the first and third novellas here, lays out the psychologies of some of the pioneers with almost case-file (if undramatic) precision. In "S/S Cairo City," a delegate to a 1939 Geneva Zionist convention writes a series of letters to a lover, another delegate, who has left (disastrously) to return to Poland. As Hitler throws shadows which many of the Zionists are not yet ready to accept, they are nevertheless grateful to jam aboard a Palestine-bound Egyptian ship out of Marseilles; on the ship, Shaham probes the skepticisms of men-ideologues being turned into plain victims by what they're fleeing. ("Kuperberg spoke about the congress. He was not at all impressed with certain speeches that I found deeply moving. He said Zionism tends to be like manna. It gives the Western Jew a taste of Yiddishkeit, while to the Eastern Jew it holds forth a promise of Europe.") The last novella--"The Salt of the Earth"--is about an old kibbutznik's first trip to America--and seems like an ironic variation on the opening story; New York literally kills, the old man, hostile to every vision of social life for which he's striven back at home (and knows he's losing there, too). And the central, title novella is where Shaham shows his hand at deeper narrative: a bookish young kibbutz woman becomes erotic guardian over her married neighbor's clandestine love life--as the situation of universal daily sharing builds up such an edifice of public virtue that private weakness becomes downfall, destruction. Like Amos Oz, whose subject matter is similar, Shaham is delicate, historical, unillusioned, undogmatic; Oz's poetry is lacking here, but Shaham may have the edge in social perspicacity."-- Kirkus

This definitive anthology gathers stories, essays, memoirs, excerpts from novels, and poems by more than 130 Jewish writers of the past two centuries who worked in the Russian language. It features writers of the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, both in Russia and in the great emigrations, representing styles and artistic movements from Romantic to Postmodern. The authors include figures who are not widely known today, as well as writers of world renown. Most of the works appear here for the first time in English or in new translations. The editor of the anthology, Maxim D. Shrayer of Boston College, is a leading authority on Jewish-Russian literature. The selections were chosen not simply on the basis of the author's background, but because each work illuminates questions of Jewish history, status, and identity. Each author is profiled in an essay describing the personal, cultural, and historical circumstances in which the writer worked, and individual works or groups of works are headnoted to provide further context. The anthology not only showcases a wide selection of individual works but also offers an encyclopedic history of Jewish-Russian culture. This handsome two-volume set is organized chronologically. The first volume spans the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, and includes the editor's extensive introduction to the Jewish-Russian literary canon. The second volume covers the period from the death of Stalin to the present, and each volume includes a corresponding survey of Jewish-Russian history by John D. Klier of University College, London, as well as detailed bibliographies of historical and literary sources.

Kadya Molodowsky (1894-1975) was among the most accomplished and prolific of modern Yiddish poets. Between 1927 and 1974, she published six major books of poetry, as well as fiction, plays, essays, and children's tales. Molodowsky participated in nearly every aspect of Yiddish literary culture that existed in her lifetime, first in Poland, where she lived until 1935, when she emigrated, and then in America. Before her emigration, Molodowsky taught young children in the Yiddish schools of Warsaw. In New York, she supported herself by writing for the Yiddish press and founded a literary journal, Svive (Surroundings), which she edited for nearly thirty years. Briefly during the early 1950s, Molodowsky wrote and edited Yiddish publications in the new state of Israel. She returned there in 1971 to receive the Itzik Manger Prize, the most prestigious award in Yiddish letters.

A volume of poetry by 50 writers from antiquity to present. It includes: translations of biblical and rabbinic literature; poems from the medieval period; Sarah Horowitz's intimate lyric poems woven into communal prayers from the early modern period; and contemporary poetry.

A beautifully translated selection of poems by one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century Umberto Saba's reputation in Italy and Europe has steadily grown since his death in 1957, and today he is positioned alongside Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti as one of the three most important Italian poets of the first half of the twentieth century. Until now, however, English-language readers have had access to only a few examples of this poet's work. This bilingual volume at last brings an extensive and exquisitely translated collection of Saba's poems to English-speaking readers. Both faithful and lyrical, George Hochfield's and Leonard Nathan's translations do justice to Saba's rigorous personal honesty and his profound awareness of the suffering that was for him coincident with life. An introductory essay, a translation of Saba's early manifesto, "What Remains for Poets to Do," and a chronology of his life situate his poetics within the larger context of twentieth-century letters. With its publication, this volume provides the English-speaking world with a momentous occasion to rethink not just Italian poetry but also the larger European modernist project.

"...this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people's history"--Publisher's info.

Jerome Rothenberg is one of the major poets of his generation. His work in ethnopoetics, Native American and tribal poetics, Jewish identities, avant-garde poetry, and experimental translation is vital to contemporary poetry and literary studies. Writing Through couples Rothenberg's translations from a variety of non-English sources with his thought-provoking commentary. It also includes a selection of his poetry ("Otherings & Variations") in which the language of significant others forms the basis of original compositions. The result is a lively and unique anthology which illustrates how poetry, like translation, can be viewed as an act of "writing through" the words of others. Translated poets in Writing Through include Celan, Lorca, Nezval, Schwitters, Picasso and Gomringer. The book also includes Rothenberg's radical translations from oral poetries, "variations" derived from the vocabularies of translated poems, and a series of "gematria poems" employing a traditional form of Jewish numerology. In addition to Rothenberg's groundbreaking essay on "total translation," the book is interspersed with his helpful commentaries and notes, which illuminate a major aspect of his total poetics.

Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) was born into an affluent German Jewish family. Following the death of her parents and the dissolution of her marriage, the fledgling poet became notorious in the fashionable cafés of Berlin for appearing in costume as a Persian girl or as an Egyptian boy. Her flamboyance was echoed in her poetry, which combined the sexual with the religious in its exploration of the ecstatic experience. Critics have long dismissed her poetry as decadent in its romantic use of references to moonlight, flowers, and woodland creatures. In his introduction, Haxton addresses such criticism by arguing that what others have termed kitsch and cliché in Lasker-Schüler’s poetry may be understood more fully as a kind of iconoclasm, like that of her Expressionist contemporaries, and as an authentic expression of emotional tenderness. Her poetry also resonates with the cultural moment of Sarah Bernhardt’s gender-bending stage performances and Freud’s sexual interpretations of the subconscious. The poems collected in this bilingual volume represent the full range of Lasker-Schüler’s work, from her earliest poems until her death. Haxton’s translation embraces the poems’ lyrical imagery, remaining faithful to the poet’s vision while also capturing the cadence and rhythms of the poetry.

Umberto Saba (1883-1957) is one of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century, as closely associated with his native city Trieste as Joyce is with Dublin. He received a sparse education but was writing distinctive poetry before he was twenty, ignoring the modernist groups which dominated the day. He came at personal themes in unexpected ways, using an unapologetically contemporary idiom. He acquired an antiquarian bookshop which prospered for a time, but his Jewish background placed him at risk with the rise of Fascism. When the Germans took northern Italy in 1943, he and his family went into hiding in Florence where they escaped detection until the Allied liberation. National fame came late in his life. 100 Poems is the most extensive selection of his work so far published in Great Britain. He emerges as one of the great European writers of his time. The book features writing from every period of his writing life. Patrick Worsnip's translations honour the poet's use of traditional Italian forms while using appropriately colloquial diction.

Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005 brings together in one volume a wide-ranging selection of essays and commentaries by one of the most significant poets, critics, and translators working with American and international poetry today. Jerome Rothenberg's work spans a period of over forty years and nearly one hundred books, and though perhaps best known as a poet, his critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of innovative, experimental poetry have become equally important facets of his work. Rothenberg's earliest critical writings concerned themselves with ethnopoetics and the poetics of performance. In the last twenty years his critical thinking has evolved to encompass more explicitly issues of modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, as well as meditations on the nature of the book and writing. This volume extends and elaborates all of those interests, allowing for the first time a comprehensive glimpse of the full trajectory of his thinking. In the first section, "Poetics and Polemics," Rothenberg's essays address a range of issues with which he's become closely associated, among them the anthology as a critical and polemical tool; the intersection of poetry with art, performance, and politics, in both contemporary and traditional practice; the poetics of Jewish mysticism as a traditional form of conceptual and language poetry; and the universality of poetic discourse, particularly as seen in tribal poetry or in poetic traditions long separated from the Western literary mainstream. In "A Gallery of Poets" is Rothenberg's lively explorations of the work of other poets, as they relate to his own work, to avant-garde poetry in general, and to the poetic traditions that concern him the most. Finally, in "Dialogues and Interviews" are Rothenberg's unbridled meditations and musings on what he calls "the life of poetry" outside the bounds of book and binding, class and category, a dynamic force at the center of all that we call human.

Aaron Zeitlin was a living cruse of sacred oil saved from the Holocaust. Wracked by guilt and despair for having survived by chance, Aaron Zeitlin, a Yiddish poet of religious intensity, reconfirmed his faith while memorializing Polish Jewry and his lost family. In Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith, Morris Faierstein succeeds in bringing the reader closer to the unique vision and verse of Zeitlin's afflicted existence. He masterfully illuminates the images and allusions, whether Talmudic, kabalistic or hasidic, that inform and enrich the poetry of Aaron Zeitlin. Faierstein chose the texts he translates with esthetic sensibility and brings across their delicate nuances of insight and emotional challenges. This volume throws open a wholly new area of Jewish poetry, a distinct spiritual perspective and a shared human expression of both the faith and grief of someone faced with the obliteration of his home, family and people. Seth L. Wolitz Gale Chair of Jewish Studies Professor of Comparative Literature University of Texas at Austin This edition of Aaron Zeitlin's Poems of the Holocaust and Poems of Faith introduces the English reader to the work of this remarkable author who embodies the broad culture of Polish Jewry that was virtually annihilated during the Holocaust. Morris Faierstein has done an admirable job in rendering Zeitlin's rich poetry into moving and powerful English, supplemented with annotations to the rich palette of mystical, biblical and religious allusions that illuminate Zeitlin's writing. This is a worthy introduction to the works of a prolific author who collaborated with his younger contemporary, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Prof. Robert Moses Shapiro Judaic Studies Department Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

Dan Pagis (1930-1986) spent three of his adolescent years in a Nazi camp before arriving in Palestine in 1946. He became one of the most vibrant voices in modern Israeli poetry and is considered a major world poet of his generation. A master scholar of Hebrew literature, Pagis drew fully on classical texts and infused his poetry with a centuries-old mysticism. Yet he also brought an immediacy and colloquialism to Hebrew poetry. In these superbly translated poems, Dan Pagis's voice can be heard celebrating the human spirit.

Lars Gustafsson is one of Sweden's leading and most prolific men of letters; a poet, philosopher, and fiction writer with dozens of books to his credit since his literary debut, at the age of twenty, in 1956. Although known in the English-speaking world primarily for his novels, Gustafsson is nevertheless one of the most frequently translated of contemporary Swedish poets. Elegies and Other Poems is a companion volume to The Stillness of the World before Bach (New Directions, 1988). As in that earlier volume, editor Christopher Middleton has made his selection from several of the poet's books and included his own translations as well as those of others, Yvonne Sandstroem, Bill Brookshire, and Philip Martin. Readers of Gustafsson's fiction will recognize in his verse the elegant mix of intellect and sheer play, the ruminations of a mind that apprehends humanity in the riddles of the universe.

Juan Gelman is Argentina's leading poet, but his work has been almost unknown in the United States until now. With this selection, chosen and superbly translated by Joan Lindgren, Gelman's lush and visceral poetry comes alive for an English-speaking readership. Gelman is a stark witness to the brutality of power, and his poems reflect his suffering at the hands of the Argentine military government (his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchild were "disappeared"). While political idealism infuses his writing, he is not a servant of ideology. Themes of family, exile, the tango, Argentina, and Gelman's Jewish heritage resonate throughout his poems, works that celebrate life while confronting heartache and loss. "remembering their little bones when it rains/ the compaerosstomp on darkness/set forth from death/wander the tender night/I hear their voices like living faces"--from Remembering Their Little Bones Juan Gelman is Argentina's leading poet, but his work has been almost unknown in the United States until now. With this selection, chosen and superbly translated by Joan Lindgren, Gelman's lush and visceral poetry comes alive for an English-speaking readership. Gelman is a stark witness to the brutality of power, and his poems reflect his suffering at the hands of the Argentine military government (his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchild were "disappeared"). While political idealism infuses his writing, he is not a servant of ideology. Themes of family, exile, the tango, Argentina, and Gelman's Jewish heritage resonate throughout his poems, works that celebrate life while confronting heartache and loss. "remembering their little bones when it rains/ the compaerosstomp on darkness/set forth from death/wander the tender night/I hear their voices like living faces"--from Remembering Their Little Bones

Jewish Poetry Series. English and German. Contains selections from Styx, Meine Wunder, Hebraische Balladen, and Mein blaues Klavier. Bibliography: p. 99-101. Includes index.

Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the first four books of poet Paul Celan's oeuvre, written between 1952 and 1963.