Poetry
אהבת תפוח הזהב
Not translated into English
Dahlia Ravikovitch · 1959
Synopsis
First collection by a twenty-three-year-old poetess. The title poem is a fable: an orange, which Hebrew calls a golden apple, falls in love with the man who devours it, because he sees it even as he destroys it. Around it, ballads drawing on the most ancient layers of biblical Hebrew, at times to the point of archaism, blend personal experience and parable; one cycle speaks of the absence of a dead father, and the landscape takes on human or animal form. The book also contains the poem of the mechanical doll.
Context
Her first poems appeared in Orlogin, Avraham Shlonsky's journal, to which Leah Goldberg had passed them on. In November 1956, Israël Zmora, who ran the Mahbarot le-Sifrut publishing house, let her know that she could publish a book, and the collection appeared in 1959. It was received with enthusiasm: Hillel Barzel saw in it a poetic achievement worthy of the name, and Baruch Kurzweil, her former secondary-school teacher, praised it; Nathan Zach, for his part, criticised her archaisms. The title poem has been translated into English by Chana Bloch.
Who it is for
A collection in Hebrew, with no complete French or English translation. It is better to know that tapuah zahav, golden apple, is the Hebrew name for the orange.
Prizes and reception
Welcomed with enthusiasm on its publication; the book that made its author one of the most promising young voices in Israeli poetry.