Working at Someone Else’s Poem

Abstract

It is, I am almost certain, between twelve and fifteen years since I worked — apart from some minor recent revisions — on translating thirty or so poems by the Hebrew poet Amir Gilboa. I first encountered his work in 1965 when I was living in Tel-Aviv, where I translated, with Bat-Sheva Sherriff, something like seventy poems post-1948. With Bat-Sheva I worked on about eight of Gilboa’s poems (about five came out all right); and with the poet Natan Zach I worked both on his poems (see Against Parting, Northern House, 1967) and on a further twenty-five or so of Gilboa’s.