I and Not an Angel. Selected poems of Eli Eliahu includes sixty-four poems translated from the Hebrew and selected from three volumes: I and not an Angel (2008), City and Fears (2011), and Epistles to the Children (2018) for which Eliahu has been awarded Israel's most prestigious prizes. Eli Eliahu, an Iraqi-Israeli poet, refuses the Israeli racial binary of Mizrahi (Israelis from Arab-speaking countries) and the culturally dominant Ashkenazi (from European countries) by making all poets Babylonian. Such a move befits the son of two Iraqi immigrants who descend from one of the most historically significant communities in the Jewish world. For Babylon (in modern-day Iraq) plays an oversized role in producing the scribes and prophets-Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Ezra-as well as the material of prophecy itself.
Eliahu's are some of the only Hebrew-language poems about early fatherhood and early childhood. Eliahu inquires into Israeli's relationship to its minority populations and its neighbors, with poems about military service, Arab labor, and the use of the media to serve a dominant historical narrative. These poems champion the weak and voiceless.
Translator Marcela Sulak provides a generous, contextualizing introduction, as well as a chapter detailing her treatment of the main concerns of translating these seemingly simple, sparse poems which, at the same time, contain enormous cultural and linguistic layers. This collection is relevant to literary translators, as well as students of Hebrew and lovers of Israeli literature, poetry, minority literatures, and others.
About the Author :
ELI ELIAHU was born in 1969 in Tel Aviv and now lives in Givatayim, where he is an editor at Haaretz daily newspaper and writes on poetry and culture. Eliahu has published three collections of poetry, including I and Not an Angel (Helicon, 2008), which was awarded the Education and Culture Ministry Prize for a debut book. City and Fears (Am Oved, 2012) was awarded the Matanel prize (2013) and the Prime Minister's Prize for Literature (2014). His latest book, Epistle to the Children (Am Oved, 2018 received a commendation of the President's Wife's Award (2018) and the Brenner Prize of the Hebrew Writer's Association (2019). His poems have been translated into English, French, Arabic, German and Turkish. MARCELA SULAK is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, The Fault (2024); the National Jewish Book Awards finalist, City of Sky Papers (2021); and the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds (2020). She's co-edited the Rose-Metal Press title Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. A translator from the Czech, French, and Hebrew, Sulak's work includes Sharron Hass's Music of the Wide Lane and other poems (University of Texas Press) for which she won an NEA translation fellowship, Twenty Girls to Envy Me, the Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, long listed for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, Bela-Wenda by Mutombo Nkulu-N'Sengha, short listed for an ALTA translation prize. Her translations from Czech include the foundational texts of Czech literature, Maj by Karel Hynek Macha and Kytice by K. J. Erben. Sulak is managing editor of The Ilanot Review, and she directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
Review :
In the first selected work by Eli Eliahu in the English language, translator Marcela Sulak delivers English readers a literary voice that is penetrating and unfiltered, a searing portrayal of the poet as a man, a father, a son. Eliahu's poetry offers an intimate look into a fractured sense of belonging on the intersection of citizenship, fatherhood and identity. Through a radical reimagining of language -shattering the molds of words and infusing them with new, unexpected meaning-Eliahu creates work that is fierce, transformative and incandescently beautiful.
-Ayelet Tsabari, author of Songs for the Broken Hearted & The Art of Leaving.
Poet Eli Eliahu knows that poetry may not save the world or pay the rent. "There are distances even wings/ cannot traverse." But in these extraordinary collection, which reaches the English-language reader in Marcela Sulak's careful translation, his poems offer an unflinching record of the difficult truths emerging from the "no rhyming zone" of the twentieth century.
-Adriana X Jacobs, author of Strange Cocktail: Translation & the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry.
