And the words only strive to reach -
The words express the effort to row
Some private rowing in the sea of entities
And boundless nothingness...
A collection of poems originally written in Hebrew and translated in English by the author, Ella Bat-Tsion. Reading poetry is a very private experience. Poetry calls upon feelings, life, religious beliefs, social conventions, etc. The reading is influenced by the mood of the moment, the music you are listening to, the odors of the room, the presence or absence of someone... You may like it or you may not; you may understand it or you may not. You don't read poetry, you listen to it; not with your ears but with your mind. This ebook has the look and "feel" of an old book. The author seems to be talking to the reader and invite him to be at one with her and transcend the words. Some poems feel like Ella woke up from a mystic sleep and hurried to write down fragments of a mystical conversation with... Poetry disturbs you? Perhaps you (unconsciously) know the power of words. After all, isn't it a basic tenet of the judeo-christian world that: In the beginning the Word already existed; the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Ella Bat-Tsion lives in Jerusalem, Israel. She has published ten volumes of her own poetry and also some collections of translations from English (Ryokan, Elsa Gidlow) and French (Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard). She received many literary prizes in her country:
Literary Prizes
Literary prize after Matti Catz, 1972.
Acum prize, 1975.
Prass Ha-yetsira from the Prime Minister Fund, 1980.
Literary prize after Miriam Talpir, 1981.
Many awards from Tel Aviv Fund for Literature and Art.
Prass Ha-yetsira from the Prime Minister Fund, 1996.
Goldberg prize from the Jewish National Fund, 1998.
This evaluation version contains only half of the poems.