End— / הסופ
by Merav Givoni Hrushovski
translated from Hebrew by Adriana X. Jacobs
ISBN 978-1-7347662-6-4
Designed, printed, and assembled by Carrion Bloom Books in SLC, UT in 2023
124 pages, presented in a bilingual edition
$20 - $30
First edition size: 50 copies.
Note 1: For orders outside of the US, please contact the press directly for instructions.
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For a few days we worked at the Epilady factory.
On a conveyor belt we assembled devices for
plucking hair. At night we slept without our
clothes. Bit by bit I lowered my lips over the dome
on the rock. Snow drifts fell on my face. Caution
avalanche area.
With
deceptively clear descriptive observations and telegraphic phrases something
else is happening here in
End—, there is a quiet slippage within the
clarity that is incremental and creates a kind of new openness that is extraordinarily
human, extraordinarily vital.
Peter Gizzi
"While people sit
in their offices, calculating, you fly/off.” Merav Givoni
Hrushovski’s
End— takes flight through the mode of the conditional, the
subjunctive, the wishful—watchful and delicate in its grieving. If translation
is like kissing through a handkerchief, Adriana X. Jacobs' gorgeous and
self-assured translation always opens, never closes, “pass[ing] on/ the kiss."
Yosefa Raz, author of This Rumor of Darger’s Armies of Girls
Merav Givoni
Hrushovski’s poems in
End— find beautiful expression in Adriana X.
Jacobs’ English translation. Everyday objects and encounters are caught up with
haunting loss and yearning in a forward movement that keeps sighing after I
turn the page. The final line of most fragments drops off mid-phrase into
mystery, half-images, unanswered questions that linger because “There is no end
to possible.” Wholeness is not yet, life happens always on a threshold, and
it’s Jacobs’ voice I want to “pour” Hrushovski’s end-less lines “into someone’s
ear”—especially mine.
Kelsi Vanada, author of Rare Earth and translator of The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela.
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Merav Givoni Hrushovski is a Hebrew poet and editor of Asoophit, a journal of art and poetry. She is also the author of Mouth in Mouth (2020, Afik Press) and Wingate (forthcoming).
Adriana X. Jacobs is an associate professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Oxford. Her poems and translations have appeared in Gulf Coast, Anomaly, World Literature Today, North American Review, Blackbox Manifold, and Asoophit, among others. Her translation of Vaan Nguyen's The Truffle Eye (2021, Zephyr Press) won the 2022 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. She is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (2018, University of Michigan Press).