A Winding Line: Three Hebrew Poets

A Winding Line gathers poems from the last decade by three of Israel’s most original and insightful poets, all of whom are women. Biblical and mythological allusions, political concerns, landscapes, and personal experiences figure throughout, while each poet brings her unique voice to the pages. Maya Bejerano’s complex poems often speak to human connection. Sharron Hass brings an interest in mythology, fairy tales, and the underworld to her poems of change and metamorphosis. Anat Zecharia addresses more overtly political and erotic themes. Together, their work speaks to the vitality of Hebrew poetry today. The poems are presented bilingually (Hebrew and English) on facing pages.

One of Israel’s leading poets, Maya Bejerano has published fifteen poetry collections; a children’s book; two collections of short stories, and a novel. Her poems have been set to music, and her work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Her volume, The Hymns of Job and Other Poems, a Lannan Translation Selection, was published by BOA Editions in 2008, and a number of her poems appear in Poets on the Edge—An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY Press, 2008). Bejerano participated in numerous poetry festivals in Israel and abroad, and was a visiting poet at Harvard University. Among her awards are the Prime Minister Prize (1986; 1994), the Bernstein Prize (1988), the Bialik Prize (2002) and the Yehuda Amichai Prize (2016). Bejerano holds a B.A. in literature and philosophy from Bar-Ilan University, and an M.A. in library sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She lives and works in Tel Aviv.

Poet and essayist and the author of five poetry collections, Sharron Hass holds a B.A. in Classics and an M.A. in Religious Studies from Tel Aviv University. She lectures on literature and poetry at the Alma Institute (Tel Aviv); at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Tel Aviv University. She participated in poetry forums and festivals in Israel and abroad and is the recipient of several poetry awards, including the Hezy Leskly Prize (1997), the Art Council Prize (1998), the Prime Minister Prize (2003), the Fulbright Fellow for the America-Israel Fellowship (2005), the Bialik Prize (2012), the Dolitsky Prize (2017), and the Yehuda Amichai Prize (2018). Her work has been translated and published in Europe and in the US, and a number of her poems appear in Poets on the Edge—An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY Press, 2008). Hass lives in Tel Aviv with her partner and their son.

Born in Tel Aviv, Anat Zecharia is a graduate of the photography department of The NB Haifa School of Design, and of the Tel Aviv Alma College of Hebrew Culture. A poet, dance critic, and editor, Zecharia is a member of the Artists’ Greenhouse for Social Activism project in the Musrara School of Photography & Media in Jerusalem. She has published three poetry collections, and her work has been translated into ten languages, including Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, English, and Swedish. Her poetry has been awarded the Prime Minister Award, the Street Prize Award from the city of Tel Aviv, and the Young Poet’s Award from the Sha’ar International Poetry Festival. She represented Israel in The Poetry Parnassus, a festival of readings and performances, and part of the 2012 London Olympics. Zecharia lives and works in Tel Aviv.

Novelist and translator and the author of fourteen books, Tsipi Keller is the recipient of several literary awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction grants, and an Armand G. Erpf Translation Award from Columbia University. Individual translations have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Europe, as well as in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization (Yale University Press, 2012, 2020, vols. 8, 9, 10). Her most recent translation collection, Years I Walked at Your Side, a volume of selected poems by Hebrew poet Mordechai Geldman, was published by SUNY Press in 2018.

Adriana X. Jacobs is a poet, scholar, and translator who has published widely on modern Hebrew and Israeli poetry and translation. Her translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in Gulf Coast, Anomaly, World Literature Today, North American Review, The Ilanot Review, among others, as well as in the collection Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant (Wayne State UP, 2016). She is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2018). In 2015, she was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press, 2021). She teaches modern Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Oxford.