Translations Available online:
“tonight again the girl is sleeping” at Apiary
“I will sever connections with Jerusalem” in Apiary
“Be Rough, Be Indifferent” in Apiary
I’m working on an MFA in Poetry in Translation from Drew University, translating work by Israeli lesbian poet Shez. She’s written poems, plays, short stories, and songs. I have her book “Crazy Dance” (or maybe Crazy Dancing, or maybe, as her publishers have translated, “The Dance of the Lunatic”) and am slowly working my way through it, finding my way back into my few Hebrew skills and pushing them to the limit, then getting help from others.
By the end of the school part of this project I need 30 poems, but the book is many more, and I hope to do many of them and work towards getting the translation published in due time. I’ll be posting some of the translations as I go, in their various and evolving drafts.
In the meantime, I’m gathering what little I can find on the web and in a (very few) books. You can find this info below. It’s a small enough Jewish lesbian world, so if you know more, please share!
More about Shez
Where I first “met” Shez and her work: Shez You can find a very rough google translation here:Shez page translated
Here is Shez’s website “My Tears Become Pearls:” My Tears Become Pearls .
Her website for “Harzaya,” a workshop on using writing to address personal or suppressed issues: Harzaya
A video about Shez and her work, including some poems read and songs set to poems from “Dance of the Lunatic”:
As I find articles about Shez online, I’m collecting them here: articles about Shez
Crazy Dancing cover
This Frenzy 