Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Poetic Obituaries: Nonetheless, everyone who surrounded [Mikhail] Gendelev

recognized him from the start as a "great poet."

In 1982, Gendelev served as a military doctor in the First Lebanon War. It was his last experience working as a doctor and resulted in a cycle of poems called "War in the Garden," which put him on the literary map. His poems continued to discuss war for the rest of his life, with lines such as "I would so like to walk out from our speech/walk out in torment and not in human/rather/to take a fiery tire neath my tongue/a pill for entering the asthma of Gaza ever-burning" (taken from "To Arabic Speech," 2004, translated by Boris Dralyuk and David Stromberg).

from The Jerusalem Post: 'I'm a great poet, but if you ask nicely I'll work as a doctor'

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