Israel in Translation

Agi Mishol's latest book of poetry, Less Like a Dove, is published in English translation this month. Host Marcela Sulak reads a selection of poems from the collection, including "Holocaust, Remembrance, Independence" in honor of Israeli Independence Day, which begins tonight.

"How we flew – Not from Gadera to Rehovot or up the Castel en route to Jerusalem, like in those dreams, but outside of the stratosphere: My father, myself and that blurry one called Agnes, who in nineteen fifty changed her name to Agi, and since then this hollow girl has tailed my father, who was her father as well."

Agi Mishol was born in Transylvania, and is the daughter of Holocaust survivors who arrived in Israel in 1950. She lives in an agricultural community and directs the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv, where she teaches creative writing.

Hear our Lag B'Omer podcast featuring Agi Mishol from May 2015.

Hear last year's Independence Day podcast featuring Amos Oz's "A Tale of Love and Darkness."

Joanna Chen will launch her translations of Mishol at Bar-Ilan's Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing Conference, which lasts from May 29-31. It will feature David Grossman, Agi Mishol, and Matti Friedman, along with several other international writers and translators.

Text: Less Like a Dove by Agi Mishol. Translated by Joanna Chen. Shearsman Press, 2016.

Music: Army Orchestra - IDF March Yehezkel Raz - en si bémol HaAchim VeHaAchiot - God Pities Kindergarden Children Podington Bear - LaDiDay Noa Fort - HaSod (lyrics by Agi Mishol)

Agi Mishol's latest book of poetry, Less Like a Dove, is published in English translation this month. Host Marcela Sulak reads a selection of poems from the collection, including "Holocaust, Remembrance, Independence" in honor of Israeli Independence Day, which begins tonight.

"How we flew –
Not from Gadera to Rehovot or up the Castel
en route to Jerusalem, like in those dreams, but
outside of the stratosphere: My father, myself
and that blurry one called Agnes,
who in nineteen fifty changed her name
to Agi, and since then this hollow girl has tailed
my father, who was her father as well."

Agi Mishol was born in Transylvania, and is the daughter of Holocaust survivors who arrived in Israel in 1950. She lives in an agricultural community and directs the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv, where she teaches creative writing.

Hear our Lag B'Omer podcast featuring Agi Mishol from May 2015.

Hear last year's Independence Day podcast featuring Amos Oz's "A Tale of Love and Darkness."

Joanna Chen will launch her translations of Mishol at Bar-Ilan’s Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing Conference, which lasts from May 29-31. It will feature David Grossman, Agi Mishol, and Matti Friedman, along with several other international writers and translators.

Text:
Less Like a Dove by Agi Mishol. Translated by Joanna Chen. Shearsman Press, 2016.

Music:
Army Orchestra - IDF March
Yehezkel Raz - en si bémol
HaAchim VeHaAchiot - God Pities Kindergarden Children
Podington Bear - LaDiDay
Noa Fort - HaSod (lyrics by Agi Mishol)

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

"Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped"

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 Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel -

"Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in

Texts:

Music:

Today's Passover-themed podcast is taken from Robert Alter's new edition, The Poems of Yehuda Amichai. Host Marcela Sulak reads excerpts from Amichai's long poem "Gods Change, Prayers are Here to Stay."

"I declare with perfect faith that prayer preceded God. Prayer created God, God created human beings, human beings create prayers that create the God that creates human beings."

Listen to last year's Passover podcast, with more Amichai and more information about the holiday of Passover.

Text: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Edited by Robert Alter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2015.

Music: Ernst Toch - Cantata Of The Bitter Herbs Mendy Portnoy - Pesach Piano Medley

Today’s Passover-themed podcast is taken from Robert Alter’s new

"I declare with perfect faith

Listen to last year's Passover podcast, with more Amichai and

Text:

Music:

Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian born and raised in Israel, has a lot to say about the importance of stories and the written word. His latest book to be translated into English is a collection of weekly columns that first appeared in Haaretz newspaper. They’ve been translated by Ralph Mandel into a collection called Native. Host Marcela Sulak reads from the final essay in the collection, in which Kashua contemplates his past as the family prepares to move from Israel to the US.

“Don’t come in,” my daughter shouted angrily when I knocked at her door.

I went in anyway. I sat down next to her on the bed and despite her back turned to me, I knew she was listening. “You hear?” I said before I repeated to her exactly the same sentence my father said to me when he left me at the entrance to the best school in the country twenty-five years ago. “Remember, whatever you do in life, for them you will always, but always, be an Arab. Do you understand?”

Kashua spent last year teaching in Chicago, and it's possible that his move to the US will be permanent. Hear more about him in this previous episode of Israel in Translation.

Text:Sayed Kashua, Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life. Translated by Ralph Mandel. New York: Grove Press, 2016.

Further reading:Let it Be MorningSecond Person SingularDancing Arabs

Music:Dudi Levi - Mahar Ani OzevMira Awad - Yousef (by Mahmoud Darwish)Mira Awad - Olakatuna (by Mahmoud Darwish)Amal Murkus - On This Earth (by Mahmoud Darwish)

Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian born and raised in Israel, has a lot to say about the importance of stories and the written word. His latest book to be translated into English is a collection of weekly columns that first appeared in Haaretz newspaper. They’ve been translated by Ralph Mandel into a collection called Native. Host Marcela Sulak reads from the final essay in the collection, in which Kashua contemplates his past as the family prepares to move from Israel to the US.

“Don’t come in,” my daughter shouted angrily when I knocked at her door.

I went in anyway. I sat down next to her on the bed and despite her back turned to me, I knew she was listening. “You hear?” I said before I repeated to her exactly the same sentence my father said to me when he left me at the entrance to the best school in the country twenty-five years ago. “Remember, whatever you do in life, for them you will always, but always, be an Arab. Do you understand?”

Kashua spent last year teaching in Chicago, and it's possible that his move to the US will be permanent. Hear more about him in this previous episode of Israel in Translation.

Text:
Sayed Kashua, Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life. Translated by Ralph Mandel. New York: Grove Press, 2016.

Further reading:
Let it Be Morning
Second Person Singular
Dancing Arabs

Music:
Dudi Levi - Mahar Ani Ozev
Mira Awad - Yousef (by Mahmoud Darwish)
Mira Awad - Olakatuna (by Mahmoud Darwish)
Amal Murkus - On This Earth (by Mahmoud Darwish)

This week, we feature a new collection of stories by Abraham Karpinowitz, Vilna My Vilna. Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from “Chana-Merka, the Fishwife,” which follows the beginnings of the Max Weinreich Yiddish Institute, today called YIVO and housed in New York. Then in Vilna, Chana-Merka would meet with Dr. Weinreich to hand over lists of "Yiddish pearls" - Yiddish phrases and expressions to be recorded for posterity. Here are some of the Vilna curses Chana-Merka submits to Weinreich:

"May you get a piece of straw in your eye and a splinter in your ear and not know which one to pull out first.

How long do you think she’ll be sick? If she’s going to lie in bed with a fever for another month, let the month last five weeks.

May a fish ball get stuck in your throat.

They should call a doctor for you in an emergency and when he arrives, they should tell him he’s no longer needed."

Karpinowitz was born in 1913 in Vilna, Lithuania, a city long considered the cultural and intellectual center of Jewish Europe. He arrived at the new state of Israel from a Cypriot displaced persons camp in 1949, and for the next three decades he was the manager of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. He died in 2004.

Text:Vilna My Vilna by Abraham Karpinowitz. Translated by Helen Mintz. Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Music:Anonymous - Mein Shtetl Belz, 1928Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band - KazimierzNigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band - Jovano Jovanake

This week, we feature a new collection of stories by Abraham Karpinowitz, Vilna My Vilna. Host Marcela Sulak reads an excerpt from “Chana-Merka, the Fishwife,” which follows the beginnings of the Max Weinreich Yiddish Institute, today called YIVO and housed in New York. Then in Vilna, Chana-Merka would meet with Dr. Weinreich to hand over lists of "Yiddish pearls" - Yiddish phrases and expressions to be recorded for posterity. Here are some of the Vilna curses Chana-Merka submits to Weinreich:

"May you get a piece of straw in your eye and a splinter in your ear and not know which one to pull out first.

How long do you think she’ll be sick? If she’s going to lie in bed with a fever for another month, let the month last five weeks.

May a fish ball get stuck in your throat.

They should call a doctor for you in an emergency and when he arrives, they should tell him he’s no longer needed."

Karpinowitz was born in 1913 in Vilna, Lithuania, a city long considered the cultural and intellectual center of Jewish Europe. He arrived at the new state of Israel from a Cypriot displaced persons camp in 1949, and for the next three decades he was the manager of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. He died in 2004.

Text:
Vilna My Vilna by Abraham Karpinowitz. Translated by Helen Mintz. Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Music:
Anonymous - Mein Shtetl Belz, 1928
Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band - Kazimierz
Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band - Jovano Jovanake