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T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 227–231 DAN PAGIS. The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis. Translated by Stephen Mitchell . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xvi Ⳮ 153. KADYA MOLODOWSKY. Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky. Translated and edited by Kathryn Hellerstein. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Pp. 543. RUTH KARTUN-BLUM. Profane Scriptures: Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry. Drawings by Menashe Kadishman. Cincinnati : Hebrew Union College Press, 1999. Pp. x Ⳮ 97. Reviewing these three books together might seem at first somewhat capricious ; after all, they span a full decade of work on Yiddish and Hebrew poetry. They are the projects of three different scholars and different presses; and they incorporate two different genres, scholarly essays and translation. Yet the intellectual and historical conditions that inspired this Jewish poetry were likewise heterogeneous and can be traced across many countries and cultures. The earliest of these three volumes is Stephen Mitchell’s translation of selected work by the Hebrew poet Dan Pagis (1930–1986). Born in Bukovina (formerly part of Austria, then Romania, now Russia), Pagis spent three years in a Nazi concentration camp before emigrating to Israel in 1946. A part of the series Literature of the Middle East, this volume was first published by the University of California Press in 1989 and was reprinted in 1996. It has made a significant contribution to this series, which includes literature in both Arabic and Hebrew. The brilliance of Pagis’s varied renditions brings into the English language what the literary critic Robert Alter, in his introduction to this volume, calls the ‘‘experience of displacement.’’ Mitchell, a renowned translator of biblical and modern Hebrew, has translated ninety-four poems chosen from over thirty years of Pagis’s work and has reorganized them around specific topics. These topics are on the whole suggested directly by Pagis’s own titles of sections (e.g., ‘‘A Lesson in Observation,’’ ‘‘Testimony,’’ ‘‘Brain’’). Mitchell makes use of such regroupings to emphasize strong connections among the various poems taken from different volumes of Pagis’s poetry. One fascinating example of this method is the section titled ‘‘Camouflage,’’ in which Mitchell brings together poems wherein the poetic persona takes on vari- 228 JQR 94:1 (2004) ous different forms and shapes, such as a tortoise, snake, elephant, armchair , emerald. Ultimately, Pagis’s poetic voice—in the guise of a fountain pen—summarizes its work in the prose section ‘‘Writers,’’ taken from his final volume, Last Poems (1987): ‘‘I’ve written many words in my life. Words of evasion or honesty, a half-truth here and there, or a truth and a half, good ones and bad ones, etc. . . . he too will be forgotten, like all writers, like me.’’ Mitchell’s translation will do much to ensure that Pagis will not be forgotten by English-language readers, as Pagis himself has ensured in Hebrew. The poet’s colloquial use of language is preserved, as is his evocation of its tensile beauty. For example, take the following lines from the poem ‘‘Twelve Faces of the Emerald’’ (from his 1970 volume Gilgul): As if I shared a secret. Shade of blue, hint of red in a polished facet, hesitating violet— they’re gone, they’re gone. I, the green source, abolish the colors of the rainbow. Mitchell here captures Pagis’s description of the dominant and dangerous beauty of the emerald, as it abolishes not only the colors but also the biblical promise of peace heralded by the rainbow after the flood (Gn 9). The English phrase ‘‘hesitating violet,’’ is a worthy equivalent of the Hebrew sagol mehasses, transposing the original melodic, consonantal repetition of ‘‘s’’ into that of ‘‘t’’ to highlight the hidden colors of the stone. Furthermore, Mitchell has successively preserved the poet’s curtailed elegiac tone by translating the Hebrew form ‘‘einam, einam’’ into the colloquial phrase ‘‘they’re gone, they’re gone.’’ The use of the English contraction marks Pagis’s deletion of the pronoun ‘‘they’’ in the original. English-language readers are thus fortunate in having a...

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