Restless Lexicons: Contemporary Hebrew Poetry in Translation

Two translators, two books by important and divergent voices in contemporary Hebrew literature.

Yakir Ben Moshe’s Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited walks “a tightrope of levity and weight” in its portrait of a younger poet’s frenetic, serial search for love in Tel Aviv. Simon Adaf’s Aviva-No, a cycle of elegies on the death of the poet’s sister, inhabits an opposite pole of grief and loss.

Dan Alter and Yael Segalovitz will read from their recent translations of these two collections, and discuss the pleasures and challenges of translating Hebrew poetry in general and those poets in particular. The conversation will be moderated by UC Berkeley Professor Liesel Yamaguchi.

Join the Magnes, along with co-sponsors Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, and UC Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies, for this special program.

Thursday, January 23, 2024 | 5:30-7:00 pm

In person at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA

The Magnes’s programs and exhibitions are supported by our community. Click here to make a suggested donation of $25 per adult.

Books will be available for sale and signing by the translators courtesy of Afikomen Books. They can be purchased ahead of time through Afikomen’s online bookshop at the following links: Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited and Aviva-No.

If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at magnes@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 643-2526 with as much advance notice as possible.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Dan Alter is the Learning and Engagement Coordinator at the Magnes. His poems, reviews and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the Poetry Prize for the 2022 Cowan Writer’s Awards. Hills Full of Holes, a second collection of poems, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2025.

Yael Segalovitz is the 2024-2025 Israel Institute Visiting Professor at the Helen Diller Institute. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.  Her recent book, How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY, 2024) follows the global circulation of close reading. She co-hosts the podcast Psychoanaliterature, featuring conversations with leading scholars at the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature, including Maggie Nelson, Judith Butler, and Jane Gallop.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Liesel Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor in the Department of French, specializing in 19th-century French literature, poetics, linguistics, literary theory, and translation. Professor Yamaguchi’s first book On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia is forthcoming and she is an active translator from Finnish and French, most notably of Väinö Linna’s Unknown Soldiers (Penguin Classics, 2015). Professor Yamaguchi is the recipient of multiple awards including the Ralph Cohen Prize for the best essay by an untenured scholar (New Literary History, 2018) and the Vivien Law Prize for the best essay by an early-career researcher on any topic in the history of linguistics (Henry Sweet Society, 2022).

ABOUT THE BOOKS

Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited catapults you right into the frenzy spiral of Yakir Ben-Moshe’s dating life. Against the backdrop of violence, war, and trauma that has always permeated Israeli society and shaped the personal as well as the political discourse, the round dance of lovers entering and exiting and re-entering the poet’s life takes on a timeless quality. The passionate vows and furious arguments between Ben-Moshe and his girlfriends, their break-ups and lovemaking in sweltering and noisy Tel Aviv are both a respite from and a mirror of the upheaval and breathlessness of day-to-day life in a country whose citizens constantly expect the unexpected. Their longing for simplicity, their solitude and clamoring for attention, their wit, self-doubt and cynicism all become tangible in Dan Alter’s brilliant, playful, and vibrant translation. Yakir Ben-Moshe won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature in 2012. He has published five books of poetry and one of children’s literature. His poems have been translated into English, Russian, Greek, Chinese and Turkish. He lives with his wife and children in Tel Aviv, where he is the Director of the Bialik House, as well as a teacher of creative writing inside and outside Israel.

Simon Adaf’s Aviva-No blends contemporary colloquial Hebrew, Arabic, and old Aramaic with biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic intertextualities. In the original text alongside the English translation, the collection is a powerful lamentation for Adaf’s sister, Aviva, who died at 43. Written from a witness of Israeli society, the daily violence taking place makes the grief reverberating through the poems both personal and palpable. Shimon Adaf has written three poetry collections and eight books of prose fiction. His first book of poems won the Israeli Ministry of Education Prize and parts of it have been included in the Israeli high school literature curriculum. For his fifth novel, Mox Nox (2011), Adaf won the prestigious Israeli Sapir Prize (2013) and his third novel, Sunburned Faces (2008), published in English by PS press (2013), appeared on The Guardian’s list of the best science fiction for 2013, alongside Stephen King and Margaret Atwood.