Poet and translator Yael Globerman, who became the new director of the writing program of the Helicon Poetry School in December 2014, was born in Tel Aviv to parents who emigrated from Poland to Israel after the Holocaust. After her army service, she studied art in The Hague, Netherlands, and film at Tel Aviv University. Globerman lived for a decade in the U.S., where her two children were born. Her translations of poetry by numerous contemporary English language writers continue to appear in major Israeli newspapers and literary journals. Her own work has been translated into English, French, German, Macedonian, Slovakian and Estonian.
‘Yael Globerman is quietly making her way to the center stage’ of Israeli poetry, according to writer Shachar Mario Mordechai, who places her in the pantheon of Hebrew women poets in his review, ‘Not the ocean but her bathtub’ (translated here by Lisa Katz for Poetry International). In particular, Mordechai discusses Globerman’s water imagery and its dialogue with that of Dahlia Ravikovitch, perhaps Israel's foremost 20th-century woman poet.
To poet-translator-publisher Rafi Weichert, Globerman is a ‘powerful poet who casts her glance broadly, phrases herself precisely and knows how to place a line of poetry on the page. Her poems are distinctive from each other, and unlike so many of the ones we read today, they make an impression on that lasts’.
In Israel Globerman is the recipient of the AKUM (2000) and Mifal Hapais (2002) prizes, and in 2008 she was awarded a Fulbright grant from the U.S. government to study at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Globerman is the author of a novel and two books of poetry and is the translator of a volume of verse by Stephen Spender. Her Hebrew translations of a selection of poems by Anne Sexton, Lessons in Hunger, is forthcoming. She lives in Tel Aviv and currently teaches creative writing at Oranim College and the Minshar Academy for Art. Globerman is on the board of the Helicon Society for the Advancement of Poetry and an editor of Helicon magazine.
Bibliography
Poetry (in Hebrew)
Alibi, Helicon, Tel Aviv, 2000
Same River Twice (Ohto ha-nahar pehahmiyam), Helicon, Tel Aviv, 2007
Fiction (in Hebrew)
Shaking the Tree (Menanaya et ha-etz), Kinneret, Tel Aviv, 1996
Translation
History of the Soul: Poems by Stephen Spender (Toldot haneshama), Keshev, Tel Aviv, 2007.
Links
In English
10 poems in Eurozine
Four poems in the Virginia Quarterly Review
Interview at The Jerusalem Post
In German
Author page on Lyrikline, including the poem 'Allee'
In Hebrew
Nissim Calderon on Globerman’s translations of Stephen Spender
Ronny Someck on her translation of Spender’s ‘Word’
Globerman's entry in the Ohio State Lexicon of Contemporary Hebrew Literature
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