Miri Ben Simhon — A Portfolio of Poetry — translated by Lisa Katz


The-Pursuit-of-Desire_Four-love-poems-by-Miri-Ben-Simhon

Born in 1950 in Marseilles to Moroccan parents on their way to the new state of Israel, Miri Ben Simhon died in 1996 in an accident that may have been a suicide. Three books were published by mainstream Israeli presses during the brief dozen years of her writing lifetime (1983-1995), and one posthumously; in 2018 they were gathered into a single volume; and a bilingual Hebrew-Dutch selection has been published in the Netherlands. English translations of her work have appeared in Poetry magazine, Poetry International Archives, National Translation Month, and most recently in the 2020 Toad Press chapbook, The Absolute Reader. A podcast reading from the chapbook is available here: https://tlv1.fm/israel-in-translation/2020/07/15/miri-ben-simhons-the-absolute-reader/

Lisa Katz (b. New York, in Jerusalem since 1983) is, most recently, translator of So Many Things Are Yours, a bilingual selection of the poetry of Admiel Kosman, (Zephyr Press, 2023) and The Absolute Reader, a chapbook of verse by Miri Ben Simhon (Toad Press 2020) A chapbook of her own work, Are You With Me, was published by Finishing Line and Shihzur/Reconstruction, poetry in Hebrew translation, by the Am Oved Press.