26 February, 2024
We are honoured to host Poet Admiel Kosman‘s book launch So Many Things Are Yours.
Here are more details about this fascinating event.
Author: Poet, Professor of Talmud at Potsdam University, and the Academic Director of the Abraham Geiger Reform Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin, Admiel Kosman is the author of nine books of Hebrew poetry, six academic books on Talmud and Midrash, and two bilingual Hebrew-English collections: So Many Things Are Yours (forthcoming, Zephyr Press, 2022) and Approaching You in English (Zephyr, 2011), both translated by Lisa Katz. Born in Haifa, Israel, Professor Kosman has lived in Berlin since 2003. In 2000, he was invited by Nobel Prize–winning Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska to participate in an interfaith festival in Cracow, Poetry – between Prayer and Song. Professor Kosman has been awarded the Israel National Prizes for Poetry including the Bernstein Prize, the Prime Minister’s Prize, and the Brenner Prize awarded by the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel.
So Many Things Are Yours is Professor Admiel Kosman’s second volume of poetry translated in English. It explores Jewish texts —Bible, Talmud, midrash — alongside bodies, physical desires, military experiences, even a refrigerator. Demons and fantasy enter these poems; so do politics, so does God. These are not religious poems in a conventionally liturgical, “inspirational” sense; yet they point to the big questions that religion asks: about love, hate, desire, violence, transgression, and disappointment.
Translator: Dr Lisa Katz’s introduction provides background information about Kosman, the translation process, and the poems themselves that brim with wonder, sadness, sensuality, and humor. Translator and poet Lisa Katz has published two collections of her own poems and translated several volumes of Hebrew poetry. Late Beauty, by Tuvia Ruebner, which she co-translated with Shahar Bram, was a finalist for the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She also translated The Absolute Reader, a chapbook by Miri Ben Simhon (Toad Press, 2020); Approaching You in English, co-translated with Shlomit Naim-Naor (Zephyr, 2011); and Look There, by Agi Mishol (Graywolf, 2006). She lives in Jerusalem.
Panel Members: Professor Adriana Jacobs, University of Oxford, and Dr Tamar Hess, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Moderator: Professor Aaron Koller, Senior Fellow at the Oxford Interfaith Forum.
Date: 26 February, 2024
Time: 18:00-19:00 GMT| 19:00-20:00 CEST | 10:00-11:00 PST | 13:00-14:00 EST | 20:00-21:00 Israel
Venue: Online
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