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Projects | Giddon Ticotsky

Projects

The Lost Poems: Modern Hebrew Poetry in Light of Its Erasures

 

This project focuses on a corpus that has barely seen the light of day: hundreds of forgotten works by some of the finest modern Hebrew poets, including Avraham Shlonsky, Zelda, Haim Gouri, Nathan Yonatan and Nathan Zach. These are not manuscripts or poems from their estate, but ones published in the press but not collected in a book by their authors, and thus consigned to near-oblivion.    

Lost to scholars and the reading public, these poems enrich the known corpus of each poet and lead to a re-examination of their writing. Moreover, this old-new oeuvre enables us to examine strategies of writing and erasure, of cultural memory and marginalization of works, with regard to each of the poets and Hebrew poetry overall. Now unearthed, it may be used to reconstruct the poetic and ideological norms prevalent in the literary field of its time, forms of internal and external censorship, and more broadly, the boundaries and the horizons of contemporary literary discourse.

This project aims also at contributing to the charting of a different, perhaps not alternative, but necessarily more complex historiography of 20th-century Hebrew poetry, and through it, of Israeli culture in the decades preceding and anteceding statehood.

A major byproduct of the project will be a comprehensive and publicly accessible bibliographic database of the works of prominent poets of four consecutive literary generations, thus filling a gaping lacuna in the study of modern Hebrew literature.

Here are some first yields of this project: lost poems of Zelda and Gabriel Preil:

zelda_lost_poems.pdf

preil_lost_poems.pdf

Get to know the project's team here!

 

The project is generously supported by Azrieli Foundation,

through the Early Career Faculty Fellowship

 

 

 

Zelda, "Is There Love?", a lost poem published in Ha-po'el ha-tza'ir, 1953; Found and re-published by the project's team in Ho! 21, 2021