August 2, 2009

Broadcast Date: 
Aug 2 2009

A discussion of two new books of (and about) poetry: the anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry and a biography of Israeli Arab poet Taha Muhamad Ali, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness.

Episode segments
  • With An Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protet Poetry
    Israel/Palestine, Arts & Culture, Literature
    Rachel Tzia Back is a poet, scholar, translator, and Professor of Literature.  She co-edited the English edition of With An Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry, with Tal Nitzan (who edited the original Hebrew edition in 2005), and translated many of the poems in the collection.
    Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    In their collective protest of the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the 42 poets in With An Iron Pen:Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry express their opposition in a range of voices, from rage to shame, from sorrow to despair.  Rachel Tzvia Back talks with us about the collection and the poets and reads several of these powerful poems.

  • My Happiness Bears No Relation To Happiness
    Israel/Palestine, Arts & Culture, Literature
    Adina Hoffman, the author of My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, is also the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood. She is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small press that publishes translations from Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, and the other languages of the Levant. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Raritan, Tin House, the Jewish Quarterly, and on the World Service of the BBC.  She and Peter Cole are currently writing about the Cairo Geniza.
    Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    In My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness Adina Hoffman has written the first biography of a Palestinian writer published in English.  We talk with her about Taha Mohammed Ali, a self-educated pe asant whose village, Saffuriyya was destroyed in 1948, and who became a souvenir shop owner in Nazareth and a unique poetic voice.  Our segment includes some readings of Taha Mohammed Ali's poetry by him, with his translator, Peter Cole.