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This article presents one issue of the Swiss literary journal Hortulus as a case study on forms of exchange, translation, and traffic between German and Hebrew in the wake of Nazism and World War II. Drawing on discussions in the field of Periodical Studies, I examine the various networks in which Hortulus 37 – a special issue devoted to new poetry from Israel – is situated. I highlight the heterogeneity of the volume, which contains materials translated into German from multiple languages, as well as original German texts. Translation itself appears in the volume as a heterogenous practice, which encompasses self-translation and various modes of collaborative translation. Since many of the authors who are translated into German in the volume were native speakers of that language, the lines between collaboration and self-translation are blurred in ways that have important consequences for our theorization of translation and self-translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interdisciplinary stylistic study of the language of Yehuda Amichai's poetry in his last and enigmatic book, "Open Closed Open" (1998). The study examines his extensive use of contrast words and their contribution to the cohesion and poetics of the book's poems. All 296 poems in the book were examined, and the contrast words were documented alongside the content of each poem. Stylistic examination reveals an exceptionally extensive 138 appearances of contrast words, among them 107 occurrences of aval. Analysis of the discourse in this research focuses on the function of the contrast words, and their meaning is determined according to semantic distinctions, which are based on the text's interpretation. It was found that the cohesion in the book is reflected in structure and content, which explains the enigmatic meaning of the book's title. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Ronny Someck's poetry is unique in that it translates canonical Hebrew poetry into popular poetry. It is especially visible in the intertextual relations that Someck's poetry constructs with Yehuda Amichai's canonic poetry. Following Marx, the article analyses Someck's poetry as commodity structure as fetish. Someck brilliantly—and broadly—utilizes the figure of the stereotype; but in contrast with the accepted norm, he relies on the contradiction at the basis of the fetish to write subversive political poetry. Avoiding the binarism existing between resistance and affirmation, in his poems Someck develops a dialectic discourse that keeps rewriting the popular text as commodity existing in the circular rotation of selling and buying. This dialectic is manifested in the mode in which the fluid, hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity is represented in his poems. Through his poetry, Someck constitutes an inexhaustible space that allows the poems to develop subversiveness, which operates under the false appearance of total, coherent spaces. As part of Israeli culture, it could have been expected that this poetry would be stereotypical, adopting an Orientalist outlook. But Someck's poems develop, instead, an unstable gaze that undermines Orientalism's binarism. The lack of binarism is expressed in Someck's poems through a dual-layered structure; the two layers, one figurative and one literal, are separate and continuous and carry out complex interrelations. Within this relational frame the literal, violent layer punctures the figurative layer, and then materializes via political violence. But instead of relating to the Israeli occupation as an arena of a binary confrontation between the Israeli army and the Palestinians, it relies on its Mizrahi identity to destroy this binarism, and thus develops a flexible moral and political stance. Through writing his poetry as a "minor literature," Someck can maneuver between its two linguistic options—deterritorialization on one hand and reterritorialization on the other. A very impressive example is the poem about the Israeli Arab-Druze poet Samih El Kasem, in which he highlights the poet's guitar-playing in Hebrew as a major language. The deterritorialization in Samih El Kasem's poetry is expressed in the subversive deterritorialization of Someck's poem. The linguistic deterritorialization is visible when Someck defines his poetry as a stammer and thus gives voice to the oppressed and the rebels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the notion of aesthetic camouflage the uses and abuses of memory and forgetfulness, this article seeks to examine and interrogate the ways in which Israel's 'national poet' Yehuda Amichai (born 'Ludwig Pfeuffer', 1924–2000) relies heavily on the imperialist Zionist ideology to justify and legitimise the settler-colonial existence of Israel from a European and Zionist hegemonic perspective. The postcolonial image of Jerusalem, as mystified by Amichai's poetry, signifies an apolitical and ahistorical Orientalist image of Jerusalem as being 'a troubled sacred and mythical city' claimed by clashing monolithic religions including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. In other words, the systematic and historical absence of Palestinian people in Amichai's poetry is ostensibly bound up with what Edward Said calls 'the functional absence of 'native people' in Palestine'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Yehuda Amichai's reflection on the meaning of language and demonstrates how his early poetry navigates between different views on the concept of 'mother tongue.' Building on Jacques Derrida's seminal essay Monolingualism of the Other, it proposes a new hermeneutic frame for interpreting Amichai's early poetry – particularly the poems collected in Shirim 1948–1962 – through the prism of monolingualism. In order to examine Amichai's version of Derridean monolingualism, the article offers close readings of his paradigmatic poems, such as "Be-yalduti" ("When I Was a child") and "Va-hagirat horai lo nirg'eah bi" ("And the Migration of My Parents Has Not Subsided in Me"), that address, both directly and indirectly, the question of language. Furthermore, this article traces the influence of the experience of immigration on the development of Amichai's poetic thinking on language. The various lyrical manifestations of this experience, such as a mediation on the meaning of the language of the mother, or the possibility to write with an accent, reveal Amichai's growing ethical understanding of language as something that belongs to the other. Thus, I argue that Amichai's unique monolingualism should be understood as a poetic site of negotiation between owning and dispossessing a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bible portrays David as a poet. Many poets after David took reference with him. Some of them unfolded his dirges on Saul and Jonathan and Abener (Petrus Abaelardus, Rainer Maria Rilke) or invented cantos which he should have sung in order to cure the insane Saul (Händel, Rilke). Others wrote in poetic licence and without biblical support songs over him: in antique times the authors of his „Last words” (2Sam 23,2-7), of the 151. Psalm, and of the concerning part in the „Hymn on the fathers” (Sir 47,2-13), in modern times renowned poets from Matthias Claudius and Gottfried Keller to Else Lasker-Schüler and Kurt Oskar Buchner; cited in this contribution are less observed poems of Jewish writers : Frank Wedekind, Yehuda Amichai, and Leonard Cohen. „It is astonishing which influence and power the figure of David unfolded in the world's poetry over the ages.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 has had a major effect on Hebrew literature's self-image. From the Haskalah onward, the Hebrew writer perceived himself as "watchman unto the house of Israel," a prophet seeking to voice the national aspirations and concerns of the Jewish people. After sovereignty was established, the writer's national role became superfluous and the literary world was gripped by a sense of melancholia over its diminished role in the newly established state. Nathan Zach, the leader of the younger generation of poets who began writing after 1948, expressed this melancholic stance by questioning the very necessity of poetry. Zach's focus on the individual's personal experiences is usually read in celebratory terms, as signaling the rejection of the collectivist ideology of the 1940s. In contrast, I read Zach's stance as one of mourning and melancholia over the fate of literature itself in the wake of statehood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]