My face is beautiful when I am understood,

it expands to the size of a broad gate

in hundreds of shades of color on the paper

in the clay’s angles and cuts.

These are the final lines of Maya Bejerano’s poem “Data Processing 60,” translated by Miri Kubovy, which host Marcela Sulak reads in today’s podcast. She also reads “Data Processing 10.” As you can tell, poetry is a kind of linguistic and emotional laboratory for Bejerano – a place to process a variety of data.

Bejerano was born in Kibbutz Elon in 1949. She’s published ten volumes of poetry, a children’s book, a book of essays, and two short story collections, which have won her the Prime Minister’s Prize, the Bernstein Prize, and the Bialik Prize. Her poems have also been set to music, and we listen to some during the podcast.

Texts:

Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry. Translated and edited by Tzippi Keller. Suny Press, 2008.

The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poets from Antiquity: A Bilingual Anthology. Feminist Press CUNY, 1999.

Music:

Yossi Mar Chaim – Wall of Joy (Voice Drawings by Etti Ben Zaken, lyrics by Maya Bejerano)

Shlomit Aharon – Ostrich (lyrics by Maya Bejerano)

Producer: Laragh Widdess
Technical producer: Alex Benish