Creator Bio
Dan Pagis
1930–1986
Poet Dan Pagis was born in Romania and was sent to a concentration camp during his childhood. He immigrated to Israel in 1946 and joined Kibbutz Merḥavyah. A professor of medieval Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, Pagis published several collections of poetry, as well as works for children. Not until 1970, however, did Pagis begin to address the Holocaust in poems that established a new poetics of indirection. In 1973, he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
Twelve Faces of the Emerald
I am exceedingly green: chill green.
What have I to do
with all the greenishness of chance?
I am the green-source, the green-self,
one and incomparable.
Primary Source
Written in Pencil on a Sealed Box-Car
here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i
Translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Primary Source
Exercises in Practical Hebrew
“Are you at peace? Hast thou killed and also taken possession?”
(examples of interrogative sentences in a grammar book)