Part kaddish, part lament, and a powerful call for stocktaking and peace, Requiem cries out for an end to carnage and slaughter: "The horror / the calamity / the disgrace, / the rubble of folly / and religion's stupidities, / the dimness of vision / and violence of despair / won't be repaired by an officer, / a bomb or a plane, / and not by still more blood. / Only wisdom of the heart could mend it... / only the gardeners of peace."
Long one of the most outspoken Israeli critics of his government's treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as "the most important Hebrew poet of his generation" (The Boston Globe).
Aharon Shabtai is the poet-conscience of Israel and one of the world's great writers--a fact forever established by Peter Cole's first-love-in-a-second-skin translations. Here is Shabtai's shalom-song, his goodbye, good night, and good luck to all that, a requiem personal and political and tragically inextricable, ripped from the headlines as much as ripped from the heart.
— Joshua Cohen
There is no one like Shabtai: an erudite classicist who writes poems of voltaic frankness and political rage.
— Eliot Weinberger
In his fusions of the sensual and the spiritual, the ordinary and the exalted, the sexual in the suffering psyche and the intelligent consciousness searching and spinning through history, myth and layers of language, Shabtai is one of the most exciting poets writing anywhere, and certainly the most audacious. His poems have a wonderful almost vertiginous energy, an enormous erudition, and a startling, finally inspiring candor. Brilliantly translated by Peter Cole.
— C. K. Williams
Aharon Shabtai’s elegaic poems are all heart in Peter Cole’s magnificent translation. This is a poetry of the fragility of old age; a poetry of sorrow for a country whose peace he won’t live to see; a poetry that serves Memory, the mother of the Muses. As a renowned translator of ancient Greek poetry into modern Hebrew, Shabtai has the epigrammatic touch, that way of chiseling lines so that the words ring in the memory. His long 'Requiem,' which specifies the dead by their names and an illuminating anecdotal detail, should remind us all that the smallest particulars of a man or woman’s life are worth more in God’s ledger than any windy abstraction uttered by pundits, celebrities, activists and politicians: 'Before I fall asleep//Grandpa Beier/undresses//and leaves/on the floor//a large,/clumsy hernia belt//like a/horse’s harness.'
— Ange Mlinko
Amidst the rubble, the haunted memories, the vengeful, the corrupt and the power-mad, in short, in the tragic maelstrom of this moment, how to mourn, what to celebrate, how to give voice both to the innocent victims of war and the “disciples of peace”? How affirm a shared humanity beyond the limits of religious, ideological and territorial claims? These are among the fraught questions renowned Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai raises in this moving, late collection, skillfully translated by Peter Cole.
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