Reviews

Dan Pagis’s poems have been through the fire — its heat, its suffering, and its refinement. They ring clear as crystal. Each like a cherished glass permits Pagis to toast the human spirit.
— Sharon Dunn, The Massachusetts Review

Pagis was one of the most vibrant voices in modern Israeli poetry. Mitchell creates supple, luminous renditions.
— Publisher’s Weekly

One has to remind oneself that this is a translated text, because the poems are made so powerfully available to the English-speaking reader. I don't know any Hebrew... But knowing English is enough to know that Stephen Mitchell's translation is one of those exceedingly rare examples of rendered poems that are poems in their own right. Mitchell's English captures all sorts of verbal complexities; you can bear down on these poems, and they don't give way to the excuse that, after all, they are only translations.
— Charles Berger, Raritan

The poems glow with pleasure in themselves. One can hear a kind of laughter resonating, as if having surpassed the moment and its trial, having presented suffering yet having set distance from it through the medium of his art. Though Dan Pagis has died too soon, may we learn from him to live.
— David Ignatow