AHARON SHABTAI’s curriculum vitae

Born 1939, is one of Israel’s leading poets. He studied Greek and Philosophy at the Hebrew University, the Sorbonne, and Cambridge. He currently teaches Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. The foremost Hebrew translator of Greek drama, Shabtai was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Translation in 1993. He is the author of more than fifteen books of poetry, and English translations of his work have appeared in numerous journals, including the American Poetry Review, the London Review of Books, and Parnassus in Review; a large selection of his poems, Love & Selected Poems, was published in 1997 by Sheep Meadow Press.
Many of the poems J’Accuse were first published on the weekend literary pages of Israel’s daily paper of record, Ha’aretz—the equivalent of their being featured in the New York Times Book Review—and were met with angry letters to the editor and threats of cancelled subscriptions. Lines like the following have gotten Shabtai in trouble steadily throughout the thirty-five years of his publishing career: “You read the Haggadah/like swine …/ Passover, however,/is stronger than you are./Go outside and see:/the slaves are rising up.”
The poet’s primary responsibility, Shabtai makes clear, is—at least on the level of literature—freshness, attentiveness, and surprise. And when things fall apart, the responsible writer can’t but apply these values to the least likely and perhaps most slippery of literary subjects—politics and public affairs. “In dark times will there also be singing?” Bertolt Brecht asks. “Yes,” he answers his own question, “there will also be singing, about the dark times.”