Nurit Zarchi

Nurit Zarchi is one of the major poets in Israel. In addition to poetry, she publishes novels, short stories, collection of essays and over 100 books for children. She has received every major Israeli award for her poetry as well as her children and youth literature, including the Prime Minister’s Prize twice (1980; 1991), the Ze’ev Prize (five times), four IBBY Honor Citations (1980; 1984; 1998; 2004), the Bialik Prize (1999), the Education Minister’s Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2005) the Amichai Prize (2007), the Ramat Gan Prize (2010), the Lea Goldberg Prize (2011), the Landau Prize for Poetry (2013), the Devorah Omer Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2014) and the Arik Einstein Prize (2015).

 
Gili Haimovich is a poet and translator. Her translations appear or forthcoming in journals such as Poetry International, Asymptote, Poetry Repair and Recours au Poème. As a poet herself, she had published a collection of poems in English titled Living on a Blank Page (Blue Angel Press, 2008) and five volumes of poetry in Hebrew and in many leading international journals. Gili works also as a writing focused arts therapist and educator.

 
I Saw the Mermaids

What’s left after long walks
In circles? Learning to cuddle yourself
Everything that strikes, children, man or wind
All turns into foam. On the seashore, breakers swallowed their highs
The wave vomited the old mermaids
Heavy from shells and bones, too bubbly to be loved
Unlike the seals, beneath their dignity
To shout from abyss.
They’re hushed better than the mortar’s rocks,
They frequently climb upon on the ocean’s parietal.
Like turtles drying out in the sun turned over on their backs,
And their blue leaks out and fills the sea,
Now you know.

By Nurit Zarchi from her book Timegrass, Carmel Publishers, 2013
© Translated by Gili Haimovich

 
Hello, hello, wave the girls
no, need for you to be hospitalized its
just a wave, picking us up from the shore
on its rhythms and foams, do understand
everything happens forward –

Hello – the girls echo, no time.
We can no longer see you.
A skyscraper wave approaches us, creeps, folds, swallows
and you can’t help it,
can’t help a thing, as always.

With your boat made of book pages,
Move back to the shore, go!
The French revolution wasn’t about you, mom.
At last you’ll get to be an audience, look at us,
they holler from America.
We’re all healthy: the kids, the president
all drinking tapioca.

Hush, it’s me, in a foreign language
maybe it’s impossible to hear me
America is noisy.

Hush the sea line rustles
what am I, a Saint Francis, preaching to
passing seagulls, shells and clarias.
A naked shore starches against me –
Did the new world reach me?

By Nurit Zarchi from her book Abel will Kiss, The Bialik Institute Publishers, 2013
© Translated by Gili Haimovich

 
Sometimes Cain
Sometimes Abel. They
themselves didn’t know which is which.

Then goody god still grinned covertly
and eagles came to peck their resting
hands below the knowledge tree.
How could they tell themselves apart

if Cain was wearing Jacob’s hands
and Abel – Esau’s voice.
when I met then, neither could I

tell them apart by
the shadow of the mirror in my hand.

By Nurit Zarchi, from Ararat, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2015
© Translated by Gili Haimovich

 
Published with the permission of Nurit Zarchi & Gili Haimovich