Are you a festival poet? Interviews with Lyor Shternberg, Hedva Harechavi and Tamir Greenberg
Three of the poets who participated in the National Poetry Festival of Israel (Metulla, northern Israel, June 1-3, 2006) and will also participate in the International Poetry Festival Mishkenot Sha'ananim (Jerusalem, October 29 – November 1, 2006) reply to questions posed by the site editor.
QUESTIONS
1. In which festivals have you participated?
2. Are you concerned about acquiring the image of a “festival poet”?
3. What are your expectations of the forthcoming International Poetry Festival at Mishkenot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem?
4. Please describe the process of choosing poems for the Jerusalem festival anthology.
5. How do you feel about festival audiences, and about encounters with other poets?
6. What are your impressions when reading translations of your poetry into English, or of your work with translators?
ANSWERS
Lyor Shternberg
1. I have appeared twice before at the Metulla festival, and a few times in the one at Sde Boker [in the Negev]. I’ve also appeared at the Helicon festival in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. This summer I’ve been invited to a [Mediterranean] poetry festival in [Lodeve] France, but Mishkenot Sha’ananim is my first international festival.
2. In my opinion there is no such thing as a “festival poet” and I’m not worried about my image. On the contrary, what’s clear to me is the difficulty of poets, often people who are introverted and withdrawn, in dealing with the exposure of their inner world to a broader audience, not only readers but a public that listens and responds. Nonetheless, I have a desire to attend festivals and experience that encounter.
3. I have two main expectations: one is that I’ll be able to get to know foreign poets personally. I'm curious about some of them and will be happy to meet them directly, face-to-face. The second is that the festival will give me greater official exposure, outside of Israeli too.
4. I tried to offer work that represents my recent writing. I've had three books thus far: Home, Day Labor, and The Page is a Landscape, published about a year and a half ago. I wanted the anthology to include poems that had not yet appeared in print, and certainly not yet in English.
5. I'm not indifferent to audience response, and the truth is that I enjoy reading in public and feel comfortable doing it. There is of course a certain amount of tension which I can’t ignore. But to me this is part of the deal and I don’t see it as an insufferable or as a serious problem.
6. I was very pleased to be able to work closely with Lisa Katz, who translated my poems and with whom a fruitful dialogue was created. I think it was a constructive process, especially with regard to concrete translation problems. As a translator from English I often encounter these issues, but in reverse. Having my poetry translated into English allowed me to see the other side of the coin for a change, and sharpened my sensitivity to the difficulties translators from Hebrew run into.
Hedva Harechavi
1. I’ve taken part in the Metulla festival four or five times, and twice in the Mishkenot Sha'ananim festival, the only international festival I've ever participated in.
2. There's absolutely no danger that this label could stick to me, for most often I refuse to appear in public and I’ve never looked for publicity at any stage in my life.
3. What interests me is listening to the poets reading, especially poets reading in foreign languages. The very appearance of these poets is fascinating to me; it’s a kind of glimpse of a different, unfamiliar world, but naturally through difference one also discovers similarities, the things we all share.
4. I preferred to use new material. Half of the poems I chose for the anthology have not appeared in my books.
5. My readings come from a space where I exist alone anyway, and this perpetual feeling of isolation seldom lifts. When I’m on stage, my reading is very personal. Only later, and not always, does this reading have an effect on the audience. When this effect takes place, the reading experience takes on additional value of course. Sometimes, after such a reading, people approach me, and the feeling of a human connection – touching one another in the deepest places beyond one’s existential solitude – is heartwarming.
6. The encounter of my poems with a foreign language always involves coping with the fact that my language is closer to me than anything else. Translations are always translations, they are not what I do, and this is absolutely clear. Vivian Eden translated my poems for the festival, and I was very pleased that she could relate to my requests about the profounder meanings of certain words and expressions [in Hebrew], even though she was choosing the [English] words. I have a feeling that the dialogue enriched the translation. I am interested in cooperation, mainly when it comes to words and idioms – after all, they are forces of nature.
Tamir Greenberg
1. I've appeared a few times in Metulla, and next fall will be my second appearance at Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem. The only other international festival in which I’ve taken part is the Mediterranean festival in Palma de Mallorca [Spain].
2. I couldn't care less about my image, but there’s no reason to stick such a label on me because I've hardly attended any festivals.
3. The main thing for me is the encounter with foreign poets, for I already know the locals, and encounters with audiences tend to be a bit embarrassing.
4. To me it was important to offer poems that have not yet been published, because new poems are closer to my heart, and they mark a certain shift in my writing with which I am comfortable right now, until another shift occurs. What is the nature of the change? I've started to write in ballad form, which was hardly used at all in the 20th century. It’s a form which allows one to express things that other forms don’t permit. There is a clear connection between this form and the plays I work on. A range of emotion is displayed through events rather than directly. These poems reflect my life at this time, and they are especially close to me, paradoxically, because of the confessional nature of my poetry.
5. My feeling on stage is that I’ve come to give and not to take – to give my best, the best I can give. If I receive positive feedback afterwards, of course that’s great, whether it’s applause or personal encounters.
6. The translation of my poems [for the festival] is the result of the hard work of translator Jennie Feldman, and the translations arose from cooperation that included my traveling from Tel Aviv to Haifa, and the exchange of emails and telephone calls. I feel that Feldman is an extremely exacting translator for whom it is more important to understand the spirit of a poem than to mimick words precisely. That is, it is more important for her to bring the power of the experience into English rather than its exact verbal expression. This idea of translation suited me very well. I feel that my translator coped in a virtuoso manner with the challenge presented by the abundance of complicated forms in my poetry. My poems are emotionally freighted and written in rhyme and meter. Because of the density of Hebrew, a few words express many ideas. I am very pleased that Feldman succeeded in transmitting the biblical intertext hinted at in my poems and which is now also inherent in the translation.
