We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Greetings From Angelus: Poems
Product Description A bilingual collection of poetry from pioneering scholar in Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem. With this volume, Scholem's work reaches beyond the confines of the academy and enters a literary dialogue with writers and philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Hans Jonas. Gershom Scholem's Greetings From Angelus contains dark, lucid political poems about Zionism and assimilation, parodies of German and Jewish philosophers, and poems to writers and friends such as Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, Ingeborg Bachmann, S. Y. Agnon, among others. The earliest poems in this volume begin in 1915 and extend to 1967, revealing how poetry played a formative role in Scholem's early life and career. This collection is translated by Richard Sieburth, who comments, "Scholem's acts of poetry still speak to us (and against us) to this very day, simultaneously grounded as they are in the impossibly eternal and profoundly occasional." The volume is edited and introduced by Steven M. Wasserstrom, who carefully situates the poems in Scholem's historical, biographical, and theological landscape. One of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem virtually created the subject of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Literature played a crucial role in his life, especially in his formative years. This bilingual volume contains his dark, shockingly prescient poems about Zionism, his parodies of German and Jewish philosophers, and poems to other writers, notably a series of powerful lyrics addressed over the course of years to his closest and oldest friend, Walter Benjamin. Translator Richard Sieburth comments, “Scholem’s acts of poetry still speak to us (and against us) to this very day, grounded as they are in the impossibly eternal and profoundly occasional.” Review "Gershom Scholem's scholarship was of [the] rare, life-giving kind. Not only have his studies of the Kabbalah altered . . . the image of Judaism--but his explorations, translations, and presentations of Kabbalistic writings exercise a formidable influence on literary theory at large, on the ways in which non-Jewish and wholly agnostic critics and scholars read poetry." -- George Steiner, New Yorker"Gershom Scholem's achievement has already put a generation of readers in his debt. He has intrepidly, singlehandedly, almost monomaniacally pursued the task of saving the literature of Jewish mysticism . . . restoring it to an estate of respect, honor, and importance." -- Arthur A. Cohen, New York Times Book Review "We see a great analytical mind at work . . . Richard Sieburth’s deep understanding of Scholem’s thought, and his masterful re-creation of Scholem’s rhythms and rhymes, reflect the inner workings of these original German poems. Sieburth’s translations offer a fascinating insight into the thoughts and literary sensibility of one of the great minds of the twentieth century." -- Peter Constantine, World Literature Today ""...Scholem’s most private writing... The poems collected in Greetings from Angelus were never intended to be published; at most they were written for an audience of one. Often this was Walter Benjamin...[I]n this crucial period of Scholem’s intellectual development, Benjamin was a key stimulus to his thinking about language, myth, and Judaism... [T]he most serious poems Scholem wrote concerned his spiritual disappointment in Zion." — Adam Kirsch, New York Review of Books " The Fullness of Time offers an aspect of Scholem's own communing with the spirit of language that will be new even to those quite familiar with his works in philology and history of religion...the verses collected here were acts of private devotion." — Erica X Eisen, Threepenny Review "Abrupt, magisterial, quizzical, sometimes acidulous, and at moments poignantly wistful.... Scholem's verses return to an authentic Hasidic tradition of indicting God." -- Harold Bloom "An excellent bilingual selection. Richard Sieburth's versio
