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    Kaleidoscope: Three Poets from Israel
    Kaleidoscope: Three Poets from Israel
    Kaleidoscope: Three Poets from Israel
    Ebook200 pages1 hour

    Kaleidoscope: Three Poets from Israel

    By Racquel Chalfi, Ory Bernstein and Shimon Adaf

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    About this ebook

    Israel is a literary giant in so many ways, as writers from Israel continue to leave their footprints across the world literature. Kaleidoscope brings together three exceptional and significant Israeli poets into one volume, representing three generations in the evolution and development of the nation’s poetry. A selection of works by three unique poets: Ory Bernstein, Rachel Chalfi and Shimon Adaf, this anthology reveals how each poet has their own voice while also reflecting three movements in Israeli poetry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMosaic Press
    Release dateMay 1, 2014
    ISBN9781771610568
    Kaleidoscope: Three Poets from Israel

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      Book preview

      Kaleidoscope - Racquel Chalfi

      2014

      RAQUEL

      Chalfi

      יפלח לחר

      Raquel Chalfi

      Raquel Chalfi, the daughter of two poets, was born in Tel Aviv. She first studied English literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, gaining a master’s degree in 1972. Later, she won a scholarship to UC Berkeley where she was awarded a prize for playwriting, and went on to study cinema at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where she won another scholarship. On her return to Israel, she worked as an editor of documentary programs for Israel Radio, directed TV documentaries and also, in the 1980s, directed two experimental films. For many years she also taught in Tel Aviv University’s film and television department. Today she conducts poetry workshops.

      In the early 1960s, Chalfi published short stories and articles; she then started to publish poetry, her first book of poems coming out in 1975. In the 1980s, her standing as an important poet grew. To date, Chalfi has published 15 books of poetry and a collection of short stories. She has received the Prime Minister’s Prize and the Ashman Prize (1999), the Bialik Prize for Poetry (2006) for Solar Plexus, and the prestigious Brenner Prize (2013). Chalfi is married to writer Chaim Tadmon and they live in Tel Aviv.

      On her poetry

      Already with the publication of her first book, Raquel Chalfi stood out for her poetic distinction and the originality of her worldview. The poetic I looks at the world with wonder and curiosity, but is itself vulnerable and shifting, lacking clear boundaries and riddled with internal contradictions. The speaker faces the chaos that surrounds and threatens to engulf her; at the same time she longs to merge with the world and its creatures, wonders at the meaning of the connection between mankind and the cosmos, and attempts to understand what is happening inside herself. But although she uses metaphors drawn from modern science, she does not actually deal with science, and her poetry does not contain any dry formulations. On the contrary, it is tempestuous and dramatic, typified by movement, sensuality, color and a desire to seize the living, elusive moment.

      Chalfi’s poetry also explores the similarity between the self, infinitesimal and transient as it is, and the cosmos – infinite and eternal. Both are driven by the same laws, and understanding the outer chaos is for her the key to understanding psychological processes and human existence. When one says ‘science’, Chalfi said in an interview in Haaretz in May 2009, the first thing to enter one’ s mind are regular laws, order, formulas. But the concepts of modern science speak precisely of the opposite. I have found that they reflect my personal feeling. The uncertainty principle, chaos, particles. As if someone had managed to explain what I intuitively feel within myself, inside my soul.

      The urge to merge with the world creates exciting but also perilous experiences: the blurring of boundaries involved, as well as the total surrender, are not simple experiences. They are multi-faceted, involve contrasting essences, and Chalfi’s attitude toward them is ambivalent, for the loss of control may lead to the brink of insanity. These fears are expressed, for example, in the flora and fauna that populate Chalfi’s poetry – real, imaginary or hybrid creatures, sometimes marvels full of vitality, or at others monsters, such as the porcupine fish, the blue shark, the barracuda, the octopus or even brutal household objects. Their love is predatory and contact with them is lethal. They are projections of opposing emotions: feelings of power and courage, anxieties, distress, ecstatic desire and thrills. A similar role is played by Chalfi’s witches – these poems have become very popular among readers and have aroused much interest, partly because of their feminist connotations. But in Chalfi’s world, witches express ambivalent qualities: on the one hand, daring, power, creativity, sexual independence and rebellion against repression; on the other, vulnerability, resignation, victimhood, and painful crashes to the ground of reality. Thus they are both marvelous and mundane, they soar to heights yet sink down to earth, are defeated and pay the price.

      This ambivalent position is also expressed in the humor and self-irony that we find in many of Chalfi’s poems. Here, self-ridicule counters the surrender to enchantment; it constitutes the lighter side of fear as well as the attempt to overcome it, and is more prominent in Chalfi’s later poetry.

      Finally, Raquel Chalfi does not hesitate to cast doubt on language, on the power of poetry and the authority of the poet. Language, for her, is an insufficiently honed instrument, one that she does not trust because it lacks the capacity to trap a shifting reality in all of its facets. Yet poetry is a necessity for her, and she repeatedly tries to enforce discipline through words and to explain the inexplicable. She even strives for precision, and succeeds marvelously.

      Critical Comments

      Compassion is the driving force behind Raquel Chalfi’s poetry. […] Everything in life has substance and value for her, each creature, each object, each moment. […] She is a poet of the love of life, and precisely when she is writing out of sorrow, humor makes an appearance in her poetry. It enables her to remove the sting from existential suffering and to make the reader

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