Dahlia Ravikovitch o la llibertat de la imaginació

Abstract

Since the publication of her first collection of poems, entitled Ahavat tapuah ha-zahav [The love of the orange], in 1959, Dahlia Ravikovitch has steadily progressed along a path which has led her to the front line of the leading contemporary poets writing in Hebrew. Born in Ramat-Gan in 1936, her family moved to a kibbutz when she was six years old, following the death of her father in a traffic accident, an irreparable loss which had a profound and traumatic impact on the personality of the future poet, who alludes to the incident in several of her poems. Later, when she was twelve, she lived in Haifa and went on to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at a time (before the so-called Six Day War in June, 1967) when the new city was still separated from the old by a cement wall. She now lives in Tel-Aviv. She has worked as a teacher and a drama critic and has translated numerous works of childrens fiction, a field in which she is also the author of a dozen or so original works. She has received two of the most prestigious awards in Hebrew culture: the Bialik Prize and the Israel Prize, and her work enjoys great popularity. All the great Hebrew-language poets of our time, but especially Alterman, Shlonsky, Ratosh, Goldberg, Zakh, Amihai and Guilboa (the latter having overtaken the former in her scale of preference), as well as the non-Jewish poets, Yeats and T.S. Eliot, have left their mark on the poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, who has nonetheless found a style all her own in which to express, not without a measure of provocativeness, her human experience as a Jewish woman who was born and lives in Israel. The hardships of her childhood, suffering, frustration, the distress caused by death, her unhappy relationship with adults, her resignation when faced with adverse personal circumstances and, in recent years, a keen awareness of the need to work and be personally committed to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, are recurrent themes in her poems. Dahl