Adam Rovner on The Streets of the River: The Book of Dirges and Power by Uri Zvi Greenberg

By Adam Rovner — Published on December 7, 2009

Adam Rovner on The Streets of the River: The Book of Dirges and Power by Uri Zvi Greenberg

I recommend Uri Zvi Greenberg’s The Streets of the River: The Book of Dirges and Power. One of modern Hebrew literature’s most distinctive voices, Greenberg published this book-length cycle as an extended poetic meditation on the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. His poetics in this volume range from lament to prophetic rage to an expressionistic martyrology. He deploys a complex web of symbols, images, and idiosyncratic spiritual associations to create a devastating and highly personal response to catastrophe. The poems that comprise The Streets of the River are notoriously difficult to translate, and though individual poems have been translated from the book over the years, they lack the consistency and weight of context that a single talented hand could give to Greenberg’s magisterial vision.

Adam Rovner is the translations editor for Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture.

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