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It was nice of you to call, nice to hear
your voice. How are you ? you have
made progress. I saw your writing in
the magazine. Yes, its been a few years since:
and those made their own, having a few siblings
not to mention how many. These you just never
count. So, whats with me ? same walls and
hundred-twenty square feet: the ground shifts
and around me everything cracks. And during nights
I tremble: sudden cracks, the plaster
peels off, upon the roof bats would spit
showers of fruit mash softened by puke and grains. And if
I attend to this silence coming from
your phone, I can clearly hear:
herds of longings fading away, galloping into the mountains.
‡ Translated from the Hebrew by Yuval Perez, April 2000.
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Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com
Winner of the 1996 Israel's Prime Minister's Prize for Literature, Elisha Porat has
published 17 volumes of fiction and poetry in Hebrew since 1973. His works
have
appeared in translation in Israel, the United States, Canada and England.
The English
translation of his short story collection The Messiah of LaGuardia, was
released in
1997. His latest work, a book of Hebrew poetry, The Dinosaurs of the
Language, was
recently published in Israel.
Elisha Porat was born in 1938 to a "pioneer" family in Palestine-Eretz
Yisrael (pre
Israel); his parents were among the founders of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, a
Kibbutz on
the Sharon plates near the city of Hadera. Today Porat, devoted to the
community
ideal, still makes his home near the original tent erected by his parents
back in the
early '30s. In 1956 Porat was drafted into the IDF (the Israeli army) and
fought in three
wars: the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the War of
South
Lebanon in 1982.
In 1998, Porat journeyed out onto the internet. His growing volume of work
can be
readily found in many literary zines. His translated stories and poems
have for years
found their way into print, most recently in The Boston Review.
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