All the images of morning
Rise in wise awareness
In the tapestry of my words.
- Abraham Sutzkever, from "In a Summer's Morning" (trans. Barbara and Benjamin Harshav)

In memory of the celebrated Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, who passed away in January, this Yiddish-language lecture focuses on the poet's early works and his second collection Valdiks (From the Forest, 1940) in particular. Professor Yitskhok Niborski discusses these early writings in light of Sutzkever's biography and contextualizes them within an analysis of the later periods of his literary creativity. Zachary M. Baker (Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections, Stanford University Libraries) translates the talk into English.

Monday, June 7, 2010
8 PM
Koret Pavilion at the Ziff Center (Hillel at Stanford)

This lecture was a program of the National Yiddish Book Center, the final event organized as part of Isaac Bleaman's Cultural Fellowship at Stanford. Funded in part by the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Covenant Foundation, and the Estate of Ruthe B. Cowl. Co-sponsored by the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, with support from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, and the Department of Comparative Literature.

Yitskhok Niborski (Medem Biblyotek and Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris) was born in Buenos Aires in 1947 and raised in a Yiddish-speaking home. Since settling in Paris in 1979, Professor Niborski has been a key figure in the development and leadership of the Paris Yiddish Center-Medem Library. He has taught language and literature courses at the Université Paris VII and intensive Yiddish programs in Brussels, New York, Oxford, and Vilnius. His books include the Diccionario yidish-español (1979), Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh shtamike verter in yidish [Dictionary of Hebrew- and Aramaic-Origin Words in Yiddish] (1999), Dictionnaire yiddish-français (2002), and Vi fun a pustn fas [As From an Empty Barrel] (1996), a collection of his prose and poetry written between 1964 and 1995.

For more information, please contact Isaac Bleaman (ibleaman [at] stanford.edu).