Aviva-no

by Shimon Adaf, Yael Segalovitz (Translator)

Overview

In the original text alongside the English translation, Adaf blends contemporary colloquial Hebrew, Arabic, and old Aramaic with biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic intertextualities. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948579056
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	11/26/2019
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Yael Segalovitz received a B.A. in Literature and Psychology and M.A. in Comparative Literature from Tel Aviv University. She is the translator of Clarice Lisepctor’s A Via Crucis do Corpo into Hebrew (Ha-kibutz Ha-me’uchad Press, 2016) and her poetry translations into English appeared in Mantis (2016), Two-Lines(2015) and T-joLT (2014. At Berkeley, Yael has taught courses in Comparative Literature and The Center for Jewish Studies on topics such as ADHD and Boredom, Intertextuality, Modern Iterations of the Hebrew Bible, Performativity and the question of Arbitrariness and Mistakes.

Editorial Reviews

10/21/2019

Presented alongside the original Hebrew, this poetic sequence is a cry of denial and grief at the loss of Adaf’s sister, Aviva, who died suddenly at the age of 43. The poems function as prayers for her soul as each of the 43 sections assumes a linguistic or religious pose: “Just before I foll asleep I tin/ I soot rite in a language where/ I am deft to de pulse of words,” Adaf writes. Grief spreads around Aviva’s death: “She had a heart heavier than the ocean/ my mother/ and it sank.” Sderot, a mortar-bombed city close to “the darkness beaten over Gaza” is where the poet was loved and tutored by Aviva, as he recollects “and here you set me down, showed me/ the books.” Surrounding this tragedy is the enduring landscape of war, in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv as elsewhere: “And the smell of tearing flesh/ will cling to the sidewalks, to the climbing prices/ of apartments.” If love is “to place in another’s hands/ the right to make us lonely,” this moving elegy asks reader to situate themselves amid the suffering of others. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

11/01/2019

Most American readers won't understand the original Hebrew of poems sitting edge to edge with their English translations in Adaf's fine collection, a meditation on the death of his 43-year-old sister. Nor are we likely to be familiar with the Talmudic, Rabbinic, and biblical references that color his lines. But in Adaf's incantatory efforts to keep his sister's spirit alive, we can recognize a universal need to stay the departed from being lost to the ages. As he writes in poem 24: "Noooooo, pain, don't let go-my heart, don't cease in sorrow/ blood, boil, flare, murmur, and body, burn, burn, burn, the nerves winding through the flesh, and you too/ muscles,/ catch fire, bones chafing the innards,/ pinch, scratch them some, so that abscess will emerge/ thus I shall not ask where her memory is—what oblivion might mime,/ thus I shall not let slip between my hands/ a sister into time." Patient readers will be amply rewarded by the rich images and charged language that give us a close look at an unfamiliar landscape from which to consider the world. VERDICT A deeply felt work that reveals both the poet's inner life and the political complexities of the world in which he lives.—Iris S. Rosenberg, New York

Library Journal