Reading Series: January 31: Aharon Shabtai and Peter Cole | Mireille Gansel and Joan Sidney

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Peter Cole’s most recent book of poems is Draw Me After (FSG). His new translations include Requiem, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions), which won the National Jewish Book Award, and On the Slaughter: Selected Poems, by Haim Nahman Bialik (NYRB). He recently published That Simple?… That Complicated: Conversations on Poetry and Translation (Free Poetry). Cole has translated widely from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern, and has received numerous honors for his work, including a PEN Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Jewish Book Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Aharon Shabtai was born in 1939 in Tel Aviv and grew up there and on Kibbutz Merhavia. The author of over twenty volumes of poetry, he is also the foremost translator of ancient Greek literature into Hebrew, having published over thirty plays in annotated editions, as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Four selections of his work have appeared in English translations by Peter Cole: Love & Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 1997); J’accuse (New Directions, 2003), which received the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation; War & Love, Love & War: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2010); and Requiem and Other Poems (New Directions, 2025), which received the National Jewish Book Award.

Joan Seliger Sidney is the Special Research Associate and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. Her published books include Body of Diminishing Motion: Poems and a Memoir (an Eric Hoffer Legacy Finalist, CavanKerry), Bereft and Blessed (AntrimHouse), and The Way the Past Comes Back (The Kutenai Press). Soul House, Sidney’s translation of Mireille Gansel’s Maison d’Âme, was published by World Poetry Books, November 2023. Poems from the book were published in New Poetry in Translation, The Common, Asymptote, and were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Soul House was long-listed for the Arrowsmith Translation Prize, to be decided October 15, 2024. Sidney’s poems and essays were also published in Fast Funny Woman, Fast Fierce Women, Fast Fallen Women, Pure Slush Anthologies, and in the CT Literary Anthology, 2023.

Mireille Gansel has won major awards for both her translations of German and Vietnamese poets, and for some of her seven books of poetry. Her lyrical memoir, Translation as Transhumance-published in an English translation by Ros Schwartz-has contributed significantly to the field of translation studies. She received the Veu Lliure 2021 Prize from the Catalan PEN. In 2018, Mireille became the Laureate of the Great Prize of Translation Etienne Dolet-Sorbonne Université. Other awards include the Khoury-Ghata poetry prize, the Gérald de Nerval translation prize, an English PEN Award, and a French Voices Award. Gansel’s first book of poetry in English translation, SOUL HOUSE (translated by Joan Seliger Sidney), was published by World Poetry in 2023.   As we want our events to be accessible to all, our tickets are offered free of charge. Yet if you’re able to donate—perhaps $18, or some multiple of 18, which in Jewish tradition signifies wishing long life and good luck to the recipient of the gift—all proceeds will go directly to supporting Yetzirah, making more events like this possible.