This Translation Tuesday, celebrated activist Zmira Poran Zion vividly conveys the silencing and marginalization she has faced as a Mizrahi Jew born to Iraqi-Jewish parents. In imagistic, concise verse, translated by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy, we see a voiceless existence ‘cast aside just because’. Read and recognize.
Mixed Media on Galvanized Tin
Bright ocher tin thick black stain
center of a wide rectangle
thin wordless bird wire-perched over mouth
she cannot sleep.
Dark ocher tin wine-red stain
rectangle like a leash with a yellow bird at its end
she cannot touch.
Her horizon is far
she hangs
over nothingness.
Clear ocher without stain
bird with no walls no windowsill
cast aside just because.
Translated from the Hebrew by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy.
Zmira Poran Zion is a playwright, educator, actress, artist and poet. Her work as poet, prose writer, and playwright, has been performed on stage and published widely in Hebrew journals and anthologies. A veteran activist for Mizrachi Jews in Israel, Poran Zion is one of the founders and leaders of the “My Sister for Women in Israel” movement and the “My Heart in the East Coalition for Equality in Education and Culture”. Born in 1954, her writing gives voice to the often overlooked experiences of growing up as a child of Iraqi-Jewish immigrants in Israel, and is a testimony to the loves and challenges of her life as daughter, mother, grandmother, and wife. Poran Zion’s first poetry collection “Ana Samar” (“I Am Samar”) was published in Hebrew in 2022 and then in English the following year. Her second collection, “Asur Lictov Al Osher” (“Forbidden to Write Happiness”) has recently been published in Hebrew. Zmira Poran Zion lives and creates in Yehud, Israel and is the mother of five children.
Yoni Hammer-Kossoy is a poet, translator, and educator. Winner of the 2020 Andrea Moriah Prize in Poetry, his writing and translations appear in numerous international journals and anthologies. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Yoni has lived with his family in Jerusalem for the last 25 years. Yoni’s first poetry collection, The Book of Noah, is now available from Grayson Books. His translation of Zmira Poran Zion’s book, I Am Samar, was published in the fall of 2023.
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