Until last year, the American poet James Reiss was unable to read the mature work of his brother, the late Israeli poet Reuven Ben-Yosef (né Robert Eliot Reiss), who made the Jewish state his home in 1959. Thanks to a recently published volume of English translations by Michael Weingrad, he has familiarized himself with both the poetry and the poet:
Now that I can finally read his poems, I see how, even though we weren’t personally close, our work developed in parallel—or what Saul Bellow called axial—lines over the decades. [Ben-Yosef’s] long poem about New York, “The City,” complements my own Big Apple poems; his portrait of the poet as an “aging lion” echoes my portrait of the king of beasts in “Three Leos”; his description of our father’s funeral service aboard a rented boat pairs well with my elegy for our dad in my first book; his frequent preference for stanzas with the same number of lines equals my own; his experiments with visual poems match “concrete” verse I continue to tweak; his love of imagery and sound shows (at least in translation) in seven stark words I wish I had written: “A shack in a stand of pines.”
Unlike such colloquial late-20th-century Israeli poetry as Yehuda Amichai’s, and unlike much of my own work, which has been called “plainspoken,” Ben-Yosef’s verse apparently deploys biblical and demotic Hebrew in dense, allusive ways. . . .
Fifteen years after he died, a major reassessment of Ben-Yosef’s work may win him readers—an audience—on this shore. As far as I’m concerned, the book is a triumph for our family.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2053/a-fraternal-note/