Piece on continued funding for the NEA published on Artnet; more Sutzkever translations in The Brooklyn Rail

A piece I recently wrote on financial funding for the arts in the US, particularly in light of the Trump Administration's desire to defund the NEA, was recently published on Artnet

Five of my Abraham Sutzkever translations were published a week or two ago in The Brooklyn Rail; In Translation. Here is a sample:

Of All Words I Envy Only One

Of all words I envy only one: The Hebrew yehi’,
“let there be.” Would the creator grant me a spark
of the word, the smallest trace of its strength, yehi’,
I would proclaim, let there be song, and it would be.

Let song be made from a rainbow’s vanishing end,
from a single ant, one lost in the desert,
from moonlit ivory born in the jungle,
from a human skull laughing at its own reflection.

Let a star become song, for no one leaves it at least
a wooden grave-marker, there where it falls.
A small face of grass in the aquarium giant and green,
a tiny golden ring, for its wife cannot see.

Yehi’, let there be a song, which until now has never been,
for the living and for these, whom men name “the deceased.”
Yehi’, let there be joy, and joy would be and all would be joyful,
Yehi’, and for an instant suffering would grow hollow.

More translations are coming soon in The Ilanot Review, West Branch, and The Northwest Review of Books. (The last two will only be in print, as far as I know.)