About the author:
Nina Segal-Rudnik, PhD, Professor of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Mount Scopus, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
E-mail:
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0615-8568
Abstract:
The article deals with the methods employed to represent Zinaida Gippius’ poetic persona within the tradition of the equivalent translations introduced by Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg, classic modern Hebrew poets, and which is now being maintained by their present followers. A shift of Gippius’ symbolist dominance is illustrated by means of a comparative analysis of the original Russian texts and their Hebrew versions. Prophetic diction, religious and civic components of her poetry, the intense use of sacred and secular texts were apposite in the situation of the struggle for Hebrew as a literary language, especially against the background of WWII as in the anthology Shirat Russia (1942). In the current situation of the Hebrew language, the emphasis has shifted to the metaphysical aspects of Gippius’ poetry as in translations published in the almanac “Dkhak le-sifrut tova” (2018).