“Only a life lived on the edge such as Liliane Atlan's could have given rise to these highly original poems, at once manic and tragic, electrifying and poignant.” Hoyt Rogers, writer and translator from the French, German, Italian, and Spanish; he has translated books by Bonnefoy and Borges, among other authors

“Liliane Atlan’s poems are as personal as dreams and as public as history. Wry, spare, flickering with wit, they are also resonant, authoritative, weighted with centuries of what Atlan calls ‘the wisdom that is not inscribed,’ that ‘makes written notes inexhaustible.’” Rachel Hadas, the author of many books of poetry, prose, and translations — her most recent book is Poems for Camilla.

Liliane Atlan writes both prose and poetry with the beauty and brilliance of lyric, the bite of epigram, the passion of an idealist fighting to survive in a brutal world. In the colloquies of great poets held in the next world, I imagine her seated with her peers—perhaps at a table with Kafka, Bob Dylan, and Emily Dickinson. Having her work in this bilingual edition, with Marguerite Feitlowitz’ elegant translations, is a valuable gift to the English-speaking world of experimental literature.”—Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2012

FOR LILIANE ATLAN (1932-2012), visionary French writer of plays, poetry, and prose, her creative quest was to “find language to say the unsayable. . . to [find a way] to integrate within our conscience, without dying in the attempt, the shattering experience of Auschwitz.”

After spending the war years as a child in hiding, she later studied at the groundbreaking Gilbert Bloch school in Paris where she studied Torah, Talmud, and Kabbalah, alongside science and contemporary literature. As a writer, Atlan defies easy categorization—she was known as “a Jewish writer,” “a Holocaust writer,” an originator of French feminist writing, and a pioneering theater artist. Her writings are steeped in Jewish sources and her French is inflected with Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish. This background helped make her into a genre-defying, feminist, and political writer, active in both France and Israel.

This bi-lingual French-English language collection of Liliane Atlan’s poetry and non-fiction prose introduces Liliane Atlan, to the greater world English language reading audience. Thematically she draws upon her personal experiences during the War, the testimonials of Holocaust survivors, and her intensive study of Jewish literature. All these experiences became the wellsprings for her writings which focus on the psychological effects of the Holocaust.

Given the recent rise and spread of Anti-Semitism in France and world-wide, Atlan’s work is being rediscovered and she is once again being recognized as an acclaimed and respected voice for new generations of readers both in Europe and in the United States, Great Britain, and other parts of the world English language readership.

When Liliane died in Israel in 2012. she engraved on her tombstone her final wish:

“The one I used to be no longer exists. But her light shines again. What light? The fight for love in spite of human horror.”

This new translation of her work resurrects her voice anew and helps insure her legacy.

MARGUERITE FEITLOWITZ is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, a New York Times Notable Book and Finalist for the PEN-Winship Prize, Feitlowitz has also translated, from the Spanish, the work of Griselda Gambaro, Luisa Valenzuela, Salvador Novo, and Ennio Moltedo. Her many awards include two Fulbright’s to Argentina, a Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute Fellowship (now the Radcliffe Institute), and a 2020 NEA Literary Translation Fellowship. She teaches at Bennington College where she is the Founding Director of Bennington Translates, a multi-disciplinary initiative on literary and humanitarian translation in the context of forced displacement, exile, and collective crisis