Pagis, Dan. The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Reference Book
- Rosenfeld, Alvin H. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Page 86-88.
Reference article:
- Yudkin, Leon I. “World Literature Today.” World Literature Today, vol. 71, no. 3, 1997, pp. 643–643. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40152989.
Stephen Mitchell succeeds not only in
Pagis was born in 1930 in Bukovina and he died in 1986.
After spending three years in a Concentration camp, Dan Pagis arrived in Palestine in 1946. His Selected Poems all have the stamp of his horrific childhood and adolescence in Europe and then his absorption into Israeli society. He mastered modern Hebrew but also became one of the leading scholars of medieval Hebre2 poetry…As Yudkin notes in his article:
Much of Pagis 's verse indeed revolves around issues of what it is possible to articulate and how. His language is both learned and colloquial, and attempts to come to grips with the raw life-and-death issues of destruction and revival. The horror is indicated, but the expression is restrained and distanced. (Yudkin Page 643.)
conveying the sense and tone of the original but also in re-creating it as strikingly original poetry. The quality conveyed is both stark and rich, tragic and guarded. Because there is always poetry is obsessed and determined by the past but refuses to be limited by it. As Pagis writes in "Point of Departure": "I fly so fast that I'm motionless / And leave behind me / The transparent wake of the past the effort and the struggle, and these imply a fight which demands engagement and which justifies that effort. (Yudkin Page 643.)
