Session Transcript
Chair: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted on behalf of
Jewish Book Week to welcome this afternoon Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman, who
are the publishers of Ibis Press, a Jerusalem based poetry press, and our
readers, the very fine actors, Catherine Kanter and Samuel West.
Peter Cole: Hello and thank you for coming. It’s true, as Natasha said,
we’re the publishers. We’re also the editors, the packers, the
proof-readers, the nit-pickers. We’re the entire production line,
essentially, and supervisors of the printers. So it’s a very small
operation and I just want to start, before we get to the material itself, just
to give you a word or two about what it is we do and what the vision of the
press is. In a word, we started the press in 1998 and our aim is to publish
Levant-related literature written in all the languages of the region, which is
to say Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, this year German, we hope eventually
Byzantine Greek and Turkish and other languages as well.
Now one of the
questions we get all the time is: What exactly is the Levant? People often
wait a while before they ask me that question, so I thought that I’ll
just read you a definition proposed by a writer that we admire very much, a
woman named Jacqueline Kahanoff who is an Egyptian Jewish writer who lived in
Egypt, Paris and Beersheba (the south of Israel), wrote in French and in
English, and the definition that I’ll give is part of an essay she wrote
where she’s really trying to define this kind of mixed hybrid world that
is the Levant. What she says, in part, is:
‘The Levant is a world of ancient civilisations which cannot
be sharply differentiated from the Mediterranean world and is not synonymous
with Islam, even if a majority of its inhabitants are Muslims. The Levant has
a character and history of its own. It is called ‘Near’ or
‘Middle’ East in relation to Europe, not to itself. Seen from
Asia, it could just as well be called the ‘Middle West’. Ancient
Egypt, ancient Israel and ancient Greece, Chaldea and Assyria, Ur and Babylon,
Tyre, Sidon and Carthage, Constantinople, Alexandria and Jerusalem, are all
dimensions of the Levant. It is not exclusively western or eastern, Christian,
Jewish or Muslim. Because of its diversity, the Levant has been compared to a
mosaic: bits of stones of different colours assembled into a flat picture. To
me, it is more like a prism whose various facets are joined by the sharp edge
of difference but each of which reflects or refracts light.’
And so the
Levant that really we are trying to build up a picture of with the books we
publish is, well it is very much a geography, a specific place on the map.
It’s really what the American writer Guy Davenport has called ‘a
geography of the imagination’, and that’s why, in the programme
today and also in the literature for the press, we have started to think of
ourselves more and more as a ‘publisher without borders’ because in
the imagination these borders don’t exist and, in particular, the kind of
imagination we’re working with is the writerly imagination. We’re
publishers, but we’re really driven by a writerly vision, not by a market
vision, and we’re trying to reflect the way in which writers in that part
of the world think about literature, are nourished by other literatures
different from their own, and creating these synthetic forms, these hybrids and
that is really, for us, where the wealth of the region comes from.
So,
today’s programme: we’ve tried to put together a kind of
mini-anthology of some of the things we’ve published. It ranges from the
gravely serious to the light and satirical. It should be a nice range of
things. We’ll start with the great Hebrew poet Haim Nachman Bialik and
the way we’ll work is that Adina and I will read short introductions to
each writer and then Sam and Catherine will read the poems and the essays.
Haim Nachman
Bialik was born in 1873, around the same time as the American poet Wallace
Stevens. He is by all accounts the greatest modern Hebrew poet. A key figure
in the renaissance of Hebrew culture at the end of the 19th century,
he was a complicated, paradox-ridden personality whose vision spanned the
entirety of Jewish learning and literature. Largely against his will, he came
to be regarded as the Hebrew national poet. To this day in Israel his name is
virtually synonymous with Jewish culture. Bialik’s genius spilled over
into other areas as well, including fiction, non-fiction and what he called the
‘ingathering’ of major works from the Jewish past.
In the essays
collected in the volume we have titled Revealment and Concealment, he set forth a dynamic binary vision of Jewish thought that
stunningly transcends the parochial. His subjects in this book range from the
nature of language to the poetic aspects of Jewish law and, in a little-read
but marvellous essay called Jewish Dualism, to
just that, the not only essentially, but essential, binary nature of Jewish
thought and Jewish existence. Hard as it is to believe, this is the first
volume of Bialik’s essays ever to appear in English. We’ll start
our programme with an excerpt from his most famous essay, Revealment and
Concealment. Sam will read from the beginning of
the essay, which was translated by Jacob Sloan:
Samuel West:
‘Every day, consciously and unconsciously, human beings
scatter heaps of words to the wind, with all their various associations; few
men indeed know or reflect on what these words were like in the days when they
were at the height of their power. Many of these words came into the world
only after difficult and prolonged birth pangs endured by many generations.
Others flashed like sudden lightning to illuminate, with one leap, a complete
world. Many were paths through which living hosts passed, each leaving behind
its shadow and aroma…. but there came a day when these same words, having
fallen from their height, were thrown aside, and now people wallow in them as
they chat, as casually as one wallows in grass.’
Peter Cole: Taha Muhammad Ali is one of the
leading poets on the contemporary Palestinian literary scene. Born in 1931 in
the Galilee village of Saffuriya, during the Arab-Israel war of 1948 he fled to
Lebanon together with most of the inhabitants of his village. A year later, he
slipped back across the border with his family and found that his village had
been obliterated.
Like many of the
other returning refugees, he settled in Nazareth. Having come from an
extremely modest background, his parent ran a dry goods store and he himself
worked from the age of eight selling eggs to neighbouring villages. He
had only two years of formal schooling. He had to look after himself and he
began to make his living by selling trinkets to Christian pilgrim near the holy
sites of Nazareth.
Today, he and his sons own a store in
Nazareth on Casanova Street near the Church of the Annunciation. It is safe to
say that he is the only souvenir-seller in town who has a sign hanging from the
rafters of his shop that says ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever. John
Keats’.
Which brings us
to the poetry. A complete auto-didact, Taha Muhammad Ali began teaching
himself classical Arabic grammar and literature in his off-hours at the shop,
and studying English as well. Initially he wrote short stories, one of which
we’ve published at Ibis, and a volume of his stories is forthcoming in
Arabic and we hope also from Ibis. But soon he moved on to poems. By the early
‘70s he was publishing in various Arabic journals in Israel and abroad.
His first book of poems wasn’t published, however, until the poet was in
his fifties.
The Saffuriya of Taha Muhammad
Ali’s childhood has served as the nexus of his fiction and poetry, which
are grounded in everyday experience and driven by a storyteller’s vivid
imagination. He writes in a forceful and direct style, with disarming humour,
and unflinching, at times painful, honesty, the poetry’s apparent
simplicity and homespun truths concealing the subtle grafting of classical
Arabic and colloquial forms of expression.
We are extremely
proud of Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story,
which I translated with Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin, and, since its
publication, Taha has become something of a international poetry star,
particularly in America. Last year in the fall Adina and I both travelled with
Taha to the States where he appeared at what I think is the biggest poetry
festival in the English-speaking world, the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey,
where there were 16,000 people in four days. This was right after September 11th
and Taha himself was concerned how Americans would receive an Arabic language
poet, and it is safe to say that he simply stole the show from all the American
poet laureates. He was a tremendous hit. It was a godsend for our small press, : books
sold like crazy!
One of the poets
there, Edward Hirsch, who is one of the better known poets in America and the
President of the Guggenheim Foundation, then wrote an article in the Washington
Post about him, and quoted in full one of his
poems, the first poem that Catherine will read, called Abd El-Hadi Fights a
Superpower, and Abd El-Hadi is a character who
recurs in Taha’s poetry and his stories and he is a kind of Arab
everyman, particular in the recurring context of the kind of person
that’s hurt most when governments lead their nations to war without
thinking about what’s going to happen to the ordinary people.
So Catherine
will read two poems. The first poem is Abd El-Hadi Fights a Superpower, and the second poem is called The Kid Goats of Jamil and it is about this village where he grew up. She’ll just
read two poems now but later on in the programme we’ll come back with one
more short poem of Taha Muhammad Ali’s.
Catherine
Kanter:
Abd El-Hadi Fights a Superpower
In his life
he neither wrote nor read.
In his life he
didn't cut down a single tree,
didn't slit the throat
of a single calf.
In his life he did not speak
of the New York Times
behind its back,
didn't raise
his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
"Come in, please,
by God, you can't refuse."
Nevertheless--
his case is hopeless,
his situation
desperate.
His god-given rights are a grain of salt
tossed into the sea.
Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury:
about his enemies
my client knows not a thing.
And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he'd serve them eggs
sunny side up,
and labneh
fresh from the bag.
[Catherine
Kanter reads The Kid Goats of Jamil.]
Adina
Hoffman: On to Gershom Scholem. One of the
greatest scholars of the 20th century, Gershom Scholem virtually
created the subject of kabbalah and Jewish
mysticism as a serious area of study. His influence, though, has been felt far
beyond the confines of the academy. This day it extends into the realm of
literature and the arts. Literature played a critical part in Scholem’s
own life, especially in his formative years and he wrote poems from his teens
on.
This month Ibis
is very pleased to be publishing a German-English book called The Fullness
of Time. It contains dark, shockingly relevant
poems to other writers and friends, including Walter Benjamin, Shai Agnon and
Bialik – who we started the afternoon with today.
The book came into
being when editor Steven Wasserstrom was researching another work about Scholem
and stumbled on the poems in the archive at the National Library in Jerusalem.
Though it was known that Scholem had written poems, no one
had ever really stopped to read this work closely or to consider how it fit
into the frame of Scholem’s life, his scholarship or his political
beliefs. Steve told us about them with great excitement. Consulting with
several scholars of German literature and of Gershom Scholem, we decided to
bring out a book, the success of which we knew at once would depend on the
quality of the translator. We were fortunate indeed to get Richard Sieburth to
fulfil the task of translating the verse of a man who was not primarily a poet,
but who possessed both a superior mind and a strong informed feel for poetry.
The results are startling and strangely moving.
As he writes in
his translator’s note to the Ibis book, ‘alternately humorous and
grave, civic and private, lyrical and doggerel, Scholem’s acts of poetry
still speak to us (and against us) to this very day, simultaneously grounded as
they are in the impossibly eternal and profoundly occasional.’
This afternoon
Sam will be reading these poems, two of which may strike you as uncannily
relevant to Israel today although I should point out that these poems were
written in the 1930s and ‘40s, and one of which is a confession of the
starkest sort, a poem that Wasserstrom calls in his notes ‘an
unmistakeable rejection of religious and political consolations’.
Samuel West:
from
Encounter with Zion and the World
History has focused its fire
on us and we go up in smoke;
gone is that secret splendor
in whose commerce we went broke.
This was the darkest hour:
waking from the dream.
And though the wounds were mortal,
they were never what they seemed.
What was within is now without,
the dream twists into violence,
and once again we stand outside
and Zion is without form or sense.
[Samuel West
reads from Medea in Vita]
Jerusalem (Summer 1948)
Nights, when the sandstone walls, baked
all day, now release their gathered heat
onto the city’s fitful summer sleep,
wafting up to where weapons lie in wait,
and where the cool moonlight scours
the distant contours of the mountains,
while bells ring from monastery towers,
chiming in on gunfire from the front,
you sense that all the age-old life pent
up in this city now draws to an end,
and you know: she is now spent,
expended on the Real, and commences
to detach herself from the present.
Poor, dethroned, stark in her nakedness,
She stands there, whom enemies could not sway,
and is once again what she always was:
a mere memory of a former greatness
and a waiting for the Final Day.
Adina
Hoffman: Ok. Now we are going to shift tonal
modes a bit. We promised you lightness so, after all that Scholem’s
dark, the next writer is Ahmad Rassim.
Ahmad Rassim was
the leading French language, Egyptian poet of the first half of the 20th
century. He was born in Alexandria in 1895, completed his studies in Cairo
then entered the Egyptian Foreign ministry. After several postings abroad,
Rassim returned to Egypt where he served in a variety of administrative
capacities, including Deputy Governor of Cairo, Governor of Suez, director of
the press office and Director-General of tourism. He published three
collections of verse in Arabic in the ‘20s, then switched to French in which
he published over a dozen volumes of poems, an anthology of popular Arabic
proverbs, art criticism and journals.
Admired by his
fellow Alexandrian, Constantine Cavafy, Rassim’s gently melancholic poems
blend the antics of French surrealist writing with the highly personalised –
one might call it ‘mock arabesque oriental style’. His whimsical prose chronicles his life as a civil servant in
Cairo and Alexandria. The Ibis volume, The Little Bookseller Oustaz Ali, is the first ever publication of Rassim’s work in English and
constitutes a kind of Rassim reader as it contains selections from both the
poetry and the prose. The book’s translator, Gabriel Levin, went to
Egypt to search out traces of Rassim and his work and he has a fine
introduction to the volume in which he recounts that treasure hunt through
Cairo and Alexandria. Sam and Catherine will read a selection from
Rassim’s whimsical prose together. The piece in question is called From
the Journal of a Poor Functionary – which
one can assume is more than slightly autobiographical.
Samuel West
and Catherine Kanter (alternately):
‘Functionaries are like perfumes: when they aren’t
attached to a brand name, they smell bad.
Every worker needs, apparently, now and then to prove to himself
that he isn’t a slave or that he has at least some sort of advantage over
the person he works for. The waiter spits into the plate of the customer in
order to created the illusion of humiliating the one
who humiliates by giving him orders.
But one must do justice to functionaries: they are mean only amongst
themselves.
The ideal boss ought to be deaf—and the functionary,
blind.’
[Samuel West and Catherine Kanter read further extracts from From
the Journal of a Poor Functionary]
Peter Cole: Esther Raab was the first native-born Israeli woman poet and an
important, if often overlooked figure in the emerging literature of the Hebrew
language. Her poetry, marked by its strong idiosyncratic voice, is reminiscent
of Emily Dickinson’s in its unorthodox, fractured syntax and its sources,
the bible and unromanticised nature. The daughter of one of the founders of
Petah Tikvah, the earliest Jewish agricultural settlement in Ottoman Palestine,
Raab herself worked the land for a good part of her early years. Eventually
she settled in ‘Little Tel-Aviv’, as it was known, where she hosted
and formed close friendships with the leading Hebrew writers and painters of
the burgeoning Jewish city.
Raab’s
intimate connection with the land was embodied in her poetry, which is
earthbound, gestural and, above all, painterly in its direct apprehension of
her physical surroundings. Thistles, which is
translated by Harold Schimmel, is the first gathering of her work in English,
and it affords the reader an opportunity to relish what he calls in his
introduction ‘the strange intensities and astounding propinquities of a
singular writer’.
Catherine will
read from two poems from Thistles, an early poem
called Saintly Grandmothers from 1930 and a poem
from the end of her career, A Landscape not of this Place which was written in 1981.
[Catherine
Kanter reads these two poems]
Adina
Hoffman: Emile Habiby: One moonless night in the
summer of 1983, on a boulder off the shore of what once was Azib, a Palestinian
village north of Acre, the narrator of Emile Habiby’s haunting last novel
catches a glimpse of a mysterious female figure in the sea. The episode, he
says, was a kind of key, like the ancient Egyptian key of life, or a magic
instrument like Aladdin’s lamp. ‘I took it up as I began to
excavate the mountains of oblivion, trying as much as I could to penetrate the
caverns of memory.’ Equal parts allegory, folktale, memoir, political
commentary and ode to a ruined landscape, the book works as an extended attempt
to discover the true identity of this mysterious female figure and, in doing
so, to reconcile the writer and his fictional counterpart with the painful past
of his land and his people.
One of the
foremost Palestinian novelists of his time, Emile Habiby, who was born in 1921,
was also among the founders of the Israeli Communist Party, a Member of the Knesset, a
journalist and an outspoken proponent of Arab-Jewish co-existence. His books
include the classic satirical novel The Pessoptimist, Pity Saraya which is from 1990, and a
collection of stories. In 1991 he was awarded Israel’s highest honour,
the Israel Prize which he chose to accept –
a decision that gave rise to considerable controversy in the Arab world. He
died in 1996.
A novel such as Saraya is particularly difficult to excerpt, so we have decided to offer
you a taste of the opening section prior to the appearance of this mysterious
figure who gives
the book its title. The translation is by Peter Theroux who is widely
acknowledged as one of the leading English language translators from Arabic.
And I should say that this book is actually not yet out, so you are getting a
sort of sneak preview. If you’d like to be notified when it is published,
you can sign up. We have a mailing list on the Ibis table. In fact, I invite
you to sign up anyway if you’d like to receive our catalogues and
whatnot. The book is scheduled to be published next fall. They will read from
this together.
Samuel West
and Catherine Kanter (alternately):
‘It was the summer of 1983. The sounds
of the sixth war, the war against Lebanon, were still echoing in their ears, as
sighs of longing echoed in their breasts for the boulder on the shore that had
been swallowed by the sea, or for the brook on Mount Carmel that had run dry
from grief.
From war to war their sense of hearing had grown ever sharper, so
that in time they learned to distinguish perfectly between the rumble of one
war and the rumble of the next. They heard a noise, the whistle of bullets or
the roar of a cannon, dirges or anthems, a military march, and this told you
which war it was, and the exact year in which it was fought.
Sometimes the rumble of war is a whisper deep in your ear that ties
your tongue and constricts thought. And sometimes it resembles the sounds
rising up out of a desolate forest on a moonless night, or the din of terrified
specters racing into the forest’s heart.
At times the rumbling is heard not by the ears but by the eyes.
And now,
only now, he found that all of the tales he’d told after 1948, all the
stories he’d recounted, were nothing but efforts to decipher the
mysteries of this rumbling from war to war.’
Peter Cole: The last writer that we’ll present in full is Dennis Silk and
after the section from Dennis Silk’s prose we’ll go back and read
just one small final poem of Taha Muhammad Ali’s and I’ll explain
why in a second.
Dennis Silk was
born in London in 1928. Dennis Silk was raised here and worked for a while as
a reader and editor for John Lane at the Bodley Head before settling as what he
himself called ‘a self-persuaded Zionist’ in Jerusalem in 1955. He
died in 1988. His first book of poetry he called The Punished Land, and he persisted in describing his adopted country as ‘a land
too beautiful for its inhabitants’ – which
is why, he explains, they punish it. Today he is thought of as a
quintessential Jerusalem writer.
Some of you may
be familiar with his classic Jerusalem anthology Retrievements, which he culled from sources as various as the Zohar, Herman
Melville and Elsa Lasker-Schuller.
Best-known as a poet, he published three books of poetry in his lifetime, all
with Viking Press in the United States. He is also a marvellous playwright for
puppet and toy theatre, and a writer of imaginative prose. This afternoon
we’ll hear excerpts from Costigan, which
is a sequence of what he calls ‘fantastic stories set in the 19th
century Levant’. Its historical characters include Christopher Costigan
and Thomas Molyneux, an Irish priest and an English sailor who died from
exposure to the Dead Sea in August, Porfiri Uspenski, a Russian monk sent to
examine the affairs of the Greek Orthodox church in Jerusalem, and the
91-year-old English Jewish philanthropist, Moses Montefiore, on his seventh and
last journey to Jerusalem. His wife Judith had been dead for some years at the
time.
Sam and
Catherine will read from Montefiore, which is
written in short sections with individual titles and they’ll announce the
title of each section as they read.
[Samuel West and
Catherine Kanter read from Montefiore]
Peter Cole: And the last poem we’ll read is, as I mentioned, a poem by
Taha Muhammad Ali. It’s called After We Die and the reason we wanted to close with this poem is because in many
ways we feel it stands for us at the press and the work that we do and the
vision that we have. Just by way of background, about three or four years ago,
those of you who have been to Israel know that there is a very lively billboard
culture there. Concerts and movies and death notices and religious
pronouncements and so forth are all pasted on billboards around the major
cities and they are changed every week. Suddenly, amongst all these other
announcements, there began appearing a very plain brown paper, a poem in
Hebrew, the poem that Catherine is going to close with, and it had been
translated by an Arabic language writer named Salman Salha and in very small
print at the bottom of the poster you could see that the poem had been written
by Taha Muhammad Ali.
But the point
was, and the way the poster was designed, was that it was almost a kind of
anonymous statement that seemed to have just sort of grown up out of the
landscape. And you’ll hear why it’s kind of interesting that this
thing would be floated there in the city that way. Round about two years ago,
at a memorial rally for Yitzchak Rabin in Rabin Square, which was broadcast on
national tv and hosted by I guess the Israeli equivalent of Jay Leno, I
don’t know if that name means anything here, but he’s a kind of
gigolo/talk show host, and in the middle of this rally when politicians were
giving speeches and popular singers were entertaining the crowd, he stopped and
said he wanted to read a poem. And the poem that he chose to read, again on
national tv, it was an incredible moment, was a poem by Taha Muhammad Ali, this
internal refugee in the city of Nazareth. But you’ll see why, I think,
he wanted to read that. Catherine.
Catherine
Kanter:
After we die,
and the weary
heart
has lowered its final
eyelid
on all that
we’ve done,
and on all that
we’ve longed for,
on all that
we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve
desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrefy
within us.
| 
