Tag Archive for Hebrew Poetry

Announcing “Frayed Light”

“Yonatan Berg’s poetry is fervent and relentless in its language, each poem moving forward in a series of proclamations that are as absolute as they are heartbreaking, ‘We told ourselves it would pass./We put everything in place, near/the couches, the armchairs. On the balcony, flowers/spiraled towards the sun.’ In the midst of this book’s almost unbearable traumas, its attention to that which is rapturous and romantic about the natural world asks us to rethink how our wars kill us and our ability to see the beauty of the planet on which we live. These are necessary translations. And these translations by Joanna Chen bring to light the fact that poetry travels beyond language. This is a beautiful book.” —Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament

This poetic collection is an honest and deeply reflective look at life overshadowed by disputed settlements and political upheaval in the Israeli−Palestinian conflict. Frayed Light brings together the best poems from Yonatan Berg’s three published collections in Hebrew, deftly translated by Joanna Chen. His poetry recounts his upbringing on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and service in a combat unit of the Israeli military, which left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He grapples with questions of religion and tradition, nationalism, war, and familial relationships. The book also explores his conceptual relationship with Biblical, historical, and literary characters from the history of civilization, set against a backdrop of the Mediterranean landscape. Berg shares an insider’s perspective on life in Israel today.

Read Yonatan Berg’s thoughtful statement on Israel, Palestine, and BDS here. 

Watch a video of Berg discussing the role of poetry and culture in preventing conflict. Source: Ukraine Today.

YONATAN BERG is a leading Hebrew poet. He is the youngest recipient of the Yehuda Amichai Prize and a number of other national awards. He has published three books of poetry, one memoir, and two novels. His latest book, Far from the Linden Trees, was published in 2018 and received excellent reviews. Yonatan Berg is a bibliotherapist and teaches creative writing in Jerusalem.

JOANNA CHEN is a British-born writer and translator whose work has been published with Poet LoreGuernica and Narratively, among many others. She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books. Chen’s translations make Hebrew and Arabic texts accessible to an English-speaking audience. As well as Frayed Light, she translated Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books 2016), a collection of poetry by Agi Mishol, and My WIld Garden (Shocken), a work of non-fiction by Meir Shalev, forthcoming in 2020. Her translations have appeared in Poetry International, Asymptote and Consequence, among many others. Read more at www.joannachen.com

 

Poet Yonatan Berg’s thoughts on Israel, Palestine, and BDS

A bookseller recently asked us for “proof of the author’s opposition to oppression of West Bank Palestinians.” This prompted us to ask poet Yonatan Berg’s about his views. His response follows here.

Yehuda Amichai, one of our greatest poets, wrote: “From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring. The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow.”

At heart, the Palestinians are right. They deserve the right of self-determination, to live without humiliation, they deserve freedom of movement and expression, to live without the constant presence of the military fist, they deserve to live.

Also, the Israelis, the Jews, are right. The world has taught them the harshest lessons. The world told them to live by the sword, fortified and strong, or don’t exist at all. And they learned—they learned too well.

The international community is right, both the Israelis and the Palestinians need to be pushed towards a peace agreement. The Israelis need to retreat, and the Palestinians need to acknowledge the Jewish presence in the Middle East. Even the BDS movement is right, although in a minor way. Pressure is indeed needed, but they are pushing in all the wrong places.

Everyone is right, and so, as Amichai wrote, everyone is also wrong. The Palestinians are wrong, because freedom cannot be birthed by terror. The Israelis are wrong, since force spawns only more force. The international community is wrong, because the region can only move towards peace when more resources are invested in education and culture, and not in meetings between politicians hosted in lavish vacation sites. And the BDS movement is wrong, for if you boycott culture, art and academia, you help laying the groundwork for extremism, populism and closedmindedness. Eventually, there won’t be anyone left to boycott, because the BDS movement harms precisely the parts of Israeli society which are interested in intercultural exchange.

Change is possible, change is crucial. Yet, it will only happen once Mahmoud Darwish will be taught in Israeli schools, and Yehuda Amichai in Palestinian schools. The exact opposite of boycotting. FRAYED LIGHT is my attempt at nurturing this point of view. It is a book filled with doubts and loves, begging the world to be dug up like a field, ready for cultivation.

-Yonatan Berg

from Yonatan Berg’s first English-language collection, Frayed Light,  translated by Joanna Chen.

SETTLEMENT

The thorny bush of these hills
is utter sadness, a stubborn blast
that rises up in the face of youth.
Tin shacks paint the sun:
a bonfire of copper rags.

The evening descends with animal pain,
the wadi rolls it to the doors of our homes.
Children gaze over the fence at the hot throat of Ramallah,
the green pupils of their eyes journeying toward heaven,
signs of prayer that echo the moon.

Gathered into the night, we ask the fig
of distances, knowing that in purple there are secrets,
and that resin tortures the fingers.
Our ears fill with the sound of lead bullets bouncing
off blue doors, ricocheting across the wadi.

We ask to go there, to hear
their stories. We wake up for synagogue,
stained glass playing with the sun,
lighting birds on bare walls, creating shapes.

We wrap skin on skin, we cover our eyes
with one hand. We cannot understand
how our parents ignore the noise that ascends
the wadi, hot with the same memory,
olives dancing fruit into the ground.

Visit the book page

Read a short essay by translator, Joanna Chen.