Customer Reviews

After the First Rain: Israeli Poems on War and Peace

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This volume was put together by Moshe Dor and Barbara Goldberg. It contains the work of sixty- six Israeli poets. It is a wide- ranging selection and has work by some of the most well- known Israeli poets, Zelda, Yehuda Amichai, T.Carmi, Amir Gilboa, Dan Pagis, Abba Kovner, Esther Raab, Pinchas Sadeh, Aryeh Sivan, Yona Wallach,Dalia Rabikovitch,Natan Yonatan, and others. It does not however have poems by other 'greats' of the tradition mainly from a previous generation. No Bialik, no Rachel, no Uri Tzvi Greenberg, no Shlonsky, no Alterman. It also does not have, and this is something which truly made the work far less valuable to me than it would be otherwise, the Hebrew original. In other words the work would have been from my point- of- view a far more interesting one had I been able to read the Hebrew original along with the translation.
The Poem contains much about loss, suffering, death. One notable element is that there is in many of the poems a sympathy with the other side. The poems are not propaganda poems, not poems of demonization, not poems which exalt the glory of war. They are very humane and caring with a great deal of sympathy for the victims on both sides. In this they reflect a certain truth of the way Israelis see the world.
One more point. The editors did not choose to anthologize the best known poem of either Zelda or Yehuda Amichai.
Goldberg herself translates many of the poems. Other translators are William Mathews,Karen Alkalay - Gut, Cicely Angleton, Chana Block Ariel Bloch, Moshe Dor, Ann Darr, Marcia Falk, Laura Fargas, Richard Flantz,
Roland Flint, Bernhard Frank, Hillel Halkin, Jane Hirshfield, A.C.Jacobs,
Rod Jellema , Shirley Kaufman, Merril Leffler,Gabriel Levin, Elaine Magarrell, Seymour Mayne, Ruth Finer Mintz, Stephen Mitchell, Jean Nordhaus, Linda Pastan,Riva Rubin, Catherine Harnett Shaw, Grace Schulman, Maurya Simon, Myra Sklarew, Henry Taylor, Ruth Whitman, Reed Whittemore, Linda Zisquit.