Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art

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.