Shimon AdafAviva-No by Trans. Yael Segalovitz

Where are all those epics you hoped to pen, or the novels. There are, to be sure, some notes strewn here and there, whole mounds of the scraps of primordial works that, given a bit of time, maybe when I retire, could come into shape. Why not? The hard part is realizing suddenly that being a writer takes more than just writing or even writing well. Contacts: those damned contacts. The ones you pick up over decades of tramping on the scene; that scene you know nothing about for the simple reason that a living is made in more mundane and pedestrian trades . . . steady pay, health insurance, and a retirement plan. At this point there’s no way around it. Even so, sometimes I fantasize about one of those people I bump into on the subway, you, for example, one of those strangers we spill our guts to knowing that once we get to the station, in two or three minutes, we’ll still be foreign and nameless, any one of those people, I mean, hearing me prattle on about all this whatever it is, suddenly puts down the New York Times he was reading, gives me a smile and says: as it happens, my friend, what do you know . . . I am an editor ; I work for X and Y Publishers . . . Here, take down my address; send me your manuscript, or bring it by in person whenever you like. But, of course, these things never happen. All the strangers I strike up conversation with usually react just like you: they bury their faces in the paper; move ever so slightly in their seat, discreetly inching away. As soon as the train pulls up to the station they jump up and run, gone in a poof. And there they leave you, tongue in the breeze. Translation from the Spanish By Charles LeBel Charles LeBel is the translator of five essays published in a recent Routledge collection, and his own writing has appeared in the journals alter/nativas and Border Lines. I come from the age of books. And there was nothing more important, more pressing. I would read, devour books. I would write. Shimon Adaf Aviva-No Trans. Yael Segalovitz Alice James Books thus I shall not let slip between my hands / a sister into time. – Shimon Adaf I MUST CONFESS: Shimon Adaf’s Aviva-No was not my first choice when it came to selecting a book for this issue’s editor’s pick. It wasn’t even my second choice. But when it showed up in my mailbox less than two days before the issue was scheduled to go to press, something made me set those other books aside in favor of Adaf’s third book of poems, first published in Hebrew in 2009. Perhaps it was the striking cover design, featuring a black-andwhite seascape by Tel Aviv–based photographer Erez Segalovitz, set against a golden background that intimates the calyces of marigold, chrysanthemum, and mustard evoked in the poems. Turning over to the back cover, seeing that Aviva-No had won the 2010 Yehuda Amichai Prize also gave the book additional cachet, along with an endorsement by Robert Alter, Amichai’s most noted translator. However, what really drew me into the depths of the book, beyond the stylish exterior, was the subject matter: the Aviva of the title names the author’s older sister, who died when she was forty-three. My own brother Dave died suddenly at the age of fifty-two, and I’ve spent the past three years coming to terms with that loss. The tradition of writing poems for a lost sibling is most famously embodied in the concluding lines of a first-century bce elegy by the Latin poet Catullus: “ave atque vale” (hail and farewell). Catullus’s brother—to whom he was deeply attached and who encouraged him to write poetry—had died abroad near Troy when Catullus was only twenty-six. Aviva had similarly encouraged the young Shimon to pursue writing , yet the author confronts the impossibility of figuring her absence with words: in “how will I, then, how will I speak / her,” the line break registers that howling abyss

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