In Talmudic Verses, Steven Shankman reflects on his own experience, and on contemporary events, through the lens of the ancient Babylonian Talmud, the crown jewel of the oral tradition of Judaism. He in effect ‘translates’ the Hebrew and Aramaic of several tractates of the Talmud into the universal language of a poetry that ranges from ecstatic free verse to rhymed and unrhymed verse composed in iambic pentameter. Shankman brings the searching and profound ethical dilemmas posed by the ancient rabbis to life in moving, meditative verse.
A propos de l’auteur
Steven Shankman holds the UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue, and Peace at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Classics Emeritus. His poems have appeared in a number of journals including Sewanee Review, Literary Imagination, Tikkun, Literary Matters, and Poetica Magazine. He is one of the co-editors of The World of Literature (1999), an anthology of world literature from a global perspective, which contains some of his own poetic translations from Chinese, Greek, and Latin. His Penguin edition of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad appeared in 1996. His chapbook of poems, Kindred Verses, was published in 2000. He is the author of many scholarly books, including Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies (SUNY Press, 2010), which contains some of his own original poetry, and Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Northwestern UP, 2017).