On this week’s episode, host Marcela Sulak reads selections of poet Tal Nitzán’s book At the End of Sleep. It’s an anthology of her poems, translated from the Hebrew by Tal Nitzán, Vivian Eden, Irit Sela, Aliza Raz, and Rachel Tzvia Back. Here is an excerpt from her poem “In the Time of Cholera”:
“Facing one another
we turn our backs to the world’s calamities.
Behind our closed eyes and curtains,
both heat and war erupted at once.
The heat will calm down first,
the faint breeze won’t bring back
the boys who have been shot,
won’t cool down the wrath of the living.
Even if it tarry, the fire will come,
many waters won’t quench, etc.
Our arms as well
can only reach our own bodies:
We are a small crowd
incited to bite, to cling to each other,
to barricade ourselves in bed
while in the ozone above us,
a mocking smile cracks wide open.”
Nitzan’s poems are often concerned with the discrepancies between the domestic and internal world, and the injustice of the exterior world in which the most private bodies are placed. In June 2015 we featured the work of the poet Tal Nitzán. You can find a link to that podcast here.
Text:
At the End of Sleep, An Anthology, by Tal Nitzán. Translated by Tal Nitzán, Vivian Eden, Irit Sela, Aliza Raz, and Rachel Tzvia Back. Restless Books, 2014.
Music:
Big Lazy – Amnesia
Big Lazy – Elephant Walk
Producer: Ariella Plachta
Technical producer: Tammy Goldenberg
