The Poetry of Gali-Dana Singer

Israel in Translation

Gali-Dana Singer is a bilingual poet, translator, an artist and photographer, born in St. Petersburg, who immigrated to Israel in 1988. To Think: A River, her first book of poems in Hebrew, in translation from the original Russian, appeared in 2000. The most recent of three volumes written in Hebrew, Translucent, was published in 2017. She’s published seven collections in Russian.

In a 2003 interview with Lisa Katz, Singer notes:

I always emphasize that I haven't switched from Russian to Hebrew, rather that I am moving back and forth from Russian to Hebrew and Hebrew to Russian. I have tried to reconstruct how the transfer took place, a process which is still vivid in my memory. It seemed to happen one way, but then I remembered that the process actually began much earlier, when someone tried to translate a poem of mine [into Hebrew] and I didn't like the result and I started to write it myself and I saw that it was impossible to translate it as it was in the original, and not worthwhile, because what works in Russian doesn't work in Hebrew. Even if I have a raw translation in front of me I don't know exactly which way I'll go.

Text:

Poems by Gali-Dana Singer, translated by Lisa Katz