Poetry
שירים שונים
Not translated into English
Nathan Zach · 1960
Synopsis
Short poems in free verse and spoken language, sparing in imagery, in which a solitary, dreamy, self-conscious “I” looks at the world without quite joining in. The book opens with “A Moment of Silence, Please”, in which the speaker sees the figure of a vagrant or prophet pass by, his coat and full beard caught with twigs, whom he could have touched and did not. An “Evening Song” tells of the break with a young girl through a walk in the street that tangles into repetitions. Irony takes the place of pathos.
Context
Zach had published a three-voice pamphlet in 1953, then a first book of his own, Shirim rishonim, in 1955; he later disowned it, and the 1960 collection, which takes up a selection from it with new poems, is commonly regarded as his first book. Between the two, his 1959 essay, Reflections on Alterman's Poetry, reproached his elder for pathos, the refusal of the language of the street and enslavement to a symmetry of metre; the book puts this criticism into practice.
Who it is for
A slim collection, with no French edition. It helps to have read a few poems by Alterman or Shlonsky to gauge what is rejected here.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the peaks of modern Hebrew poetry and as his most important book, it made Zach one of the most influential figures in Israeli letters.