J'Accuse
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A01=Aharon Shabtai
Author_Aharon Shabtai
Category=DCF
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Product details
- ISBN 9780811215398
- Weight: 111g
- Dimensions: 132 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 17 Apr 2003
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Playing on Zola's famous letter denouncing the anti-Semitism of the French government throughout the Dreyfus affair, Aharon Shabtai's title can be taken literally: it charges his government and his people with crimes against the humanity of their neighbors. Here we find snipers shooting children, spin-masters trying to whitewash blood baths, ammunition "distributed like bars of chocolate," and "technicians of slaughter" for whom morality is merely "a pain in the ass."
With a splendid lyrical physicality that accentuates Shabtai's terse immediacy and matter-of-fact scorn, the poems cover a period of six yearsfrom the 1996 election of Netanyahu as prime minister through the curfews, lynchings, riots, sieges, and bombings of the second intifada. But at the heart of J'Accuse is the fate of the ethical Hebrew culture in which the poet was raised: Shabtai refuses to abandon his belief in the moral underpinnings of Israeli society or to be silent before the barbaric and brutal. He witnesses, he protests, he warns. Above all, he holds up a mirror to his nation.
An Israeli poet born in 1939, and an outspoken critic of his government’s treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as “one of the most exciting writers working in Hebrew today” (Ha’aretz). Author of twenty-three volumes of poetry, he is also the foremost translator of Greek drama into Hebrew. New Directions publishes J’accuse, which received the PEN Translation Prize, as well as War & Love, Love & War, and Requiem & Other Poems. Peter Cole’s previous books of poems include Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). Among his volumes of translation are The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.
