There is no one like Shabtai: an erudite classicist who writes poems of voltaic frankness and political rage. These lyrics of a patriot betrayed by his government are both timely and timeless. Written for the newspapers, they will endure long after their referents are forgotten. But we are marooned in the present, and J’Accuse is the one new book of poetry that should be read right now.
An Israeli poet born in 1939, Shabtai is notorious for his poems of frank erotic confessionalism and political rage, which appear regularly in the leading newspaper, Ha’aretz. On another side, he is the primary translator of classical Greek literature into Hebrew. New Directions published his book, J’Accuse, in 2003 and War & Love: Love & War: New and Selected Poems in 2010, both translated by Peter Cole. Also available in English is _Love & Selected Poems _(Sheep Meadow, 1997).
Translated by Peter Cole
War & Love, Love & War presents a poetic biography of one of Israel’s living literary masters, an artist whom the National Book Award-winner C. K. Williams has called “one of the most exciting poets writing anywhere, and certainly the most audacious.” The book moves from shockingly potent political poems to love lyrics that are as explosive and sometimes bawdy as they are tender; from early and stirring inventories of kibbutz life to a radically inventive midrash on (and paean to) the career and character of the Israeli right-wing leader Menachem Begin; from passion for justice to passion for a deeply mourned wife. At the end of it all is a prose ars poetica in which Shabtai discusses the method behind his marvelous madness. Peter Cole’s powerful translation displays the full and astonishing range of Aharon Shabtai’s oeuvre in a single volume for the first time in English.
Translated by Peter Cole
Playing on Zola’s famous letter denouncing the anti-Semitism of the French government throughout the Dreyfus affair, Aharon Shabtai’s title can be taken literally: it charges his government and his people with crimes against the humanity of their neighbors. Here we find snipers shooting children, spin-masters trying to whitewash blood baths, ammunition “distributed like bars of chocolate,” and “technicians of slaughter” for whom morality is merely “a pain in the ass.” With a splendid lyrical physicality that accentuates Shabtai’s terse immediacy and matter-of-fact scorn, the poems cover a period of six years – from the 1996 election of Netanyahu as prime minister through the curfews, lynchings, riots, sieges, and bombings of the second intifada. But at the heart of J’Accuse is the fate of the ethical Hebrew culture in which the poet was raised: Shabtai refuses to abandon his belief in the moral underpinnings of Israeli society or to be silent before the barbaric and brutal. He witnesses, he protests, he warns. Above all, he holds up a mirror to his nation.
There is no one like Shabtai: an erudite classicist who writes poems of voltaic frankness and political rage. These lyrics of a patriot betrayed by his government are both timely and timeless. Written for the newspapers, they will endure long after their referents are forgotten. But we are marooned in the present, and J’Accuse is the one new book of poetry that should be read right now.
Shabtai is one of the most exciting poets writing anywhere.
