Great Regulars: An orange did love

The man who ate it,
To its flayer it brought
Flesh for the teeth.

But the carnality takes on a whole new meaning when we learn, from the translators' note, that the word here rendered as "flesh" is not the standard Hebrew basar, but barot. This word appears only once in the Bible, in Lamentations 4:10, a description of the siege of Jerusalem: "With their own hands, tenderhearted women have cooked their own children; such became their fare (barot), in the disaster of my poor people." It is an open question how many of [Dahlia] Ravikovitch's original readers would have known their Bible well enough to understand this shocking allusion, but the translators make the poet's intention clear, in this and many similar cases.

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: A Clockwork Doll

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