The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis
University of California Press, 1996

Winner of the 1990 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets

A survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, where he spent three years as an adolescent before escaping to Palestine in 1946, Dan Pagis testifies to the Holocaust, as he must, but he does so with a voice both disembodied by terror and charged with compassion for his persecutors. Pagis’s poems do not focus exclusively on the Holocaust, and his ability to range playfully from historical fact to science fiction is astonishing. Translated into meticulous and superb English by Stephen Mitchell, Pagis’s wild imaginings and insights into human existence seem both familiar and hauntingly inescapable.