Marcela Sulak
Photo by Daniel Fainberg
Bio
Marcela Sulak’s poetry includes the forthcoming City of Sky Papers (2020), Decency (2015), and Immigrant (2010)—all from Black Lawrence Press. Her lyric Memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds, is forthcoming next year from Black Lawrence Press. She's co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres and translated four poetry collections from Czech, French, and, most recently, from the Hebrew, Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems by Orit Gidali (2016), which was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry Translation. Sulak is an associate professor in the department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University where she teaches American literature, literary translation, prosody, and creative writing.
The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship is for me, first and foremost, an important and meaningful affirmation of the value of Sharron Hass’s work in the world—I can’t stress highly enough how much we need Hass’s style of empathetic intelligence in the divisive and antagonistic social and political climate of Israel and the United States today. Financially the fellowship allows me uninterrupted time in the summers and between university sessions, to focus exclusively on this work. Always before, I’ve translated poems in the spaces between other projects and duties. Consequently, each translation project usually takes me years. The NEA gives me both financial security and freedom to focus only on this work. And I don’t see how I could complete this particular project otherwise, given its complexity.
from "Dinner with Joachim"by Sharon Hass
[Translated from the Hebrew]
Sixth Echo
Every day an angel on the threshold of the room is expecting a call
for a bath and bread. Distant figures on the horizon,
the trio that sits long years without seeing, without hearing, without
speaking, sails like a phantasmagoria on the plain of my dreams
and freezes the passage of visions from the outside to inside. I see without believing
things that in other days might have engendered faith, but now like the darkness’s melancholic guests of honor, in the dark’s slow water, mysterious lighting and short grass. I traverse places
that were hung above me. There is no evidence of the visions, no hoof, no mud or paper crown,
only an emptying heart transfixed by the sands of time.
But the hand that reached for the daisy or a dog
touches by chance the hem of the invisible-that-sees,
and it trembles—
About Sharron Hass
Sharron Hass is the author of six collections of poems: The Mountain Mother is Gone (1997), which won the Hezy Leskly Award and the Art Council Prize; The Stranger and the Everyday Woman (2001), which won the Israeli Prime Minister's Prize for Poetry); Subjects of the Sun (2005); Daylight (2011), which won The Bialik Prize; Music of the Wide Lane (2015), which won the Dolitsky Prize in 2017 and the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize, 2018; and The Rake, forthcoming in 2019. She has also published a book-length essay on Oedipus in Colonus, The Day After (2019). Hass’s poetry is extremely complex, both formally and philosophically; it draws upon Hellenistic philosophy and Greek myth to examine the human condition as manifest in a contemporary Israeli context.