Love
Written by Dorit Weisman
Translated from the Hebrew by Joanna Chen
Narrated by Bill Wolak
Israel
My aunt, not so young anymore,
with a hearing aid, a suitcase
and two flowery purses,
set out on a voyage
from her house, about an hour from Boston
and to the airport
and from there in an Air France plane over the Atlantic
as far as Paris 5905.86 kilometers.
In Paris she waited some hours
and afterward took another plane—also Air France—over the Mediterranean
to Ben Gurion Airport, 3280 kilometers,
where I waited for her one afternoon.
I came, she said,
for love.
Dorit Weisman is an award-winning poet with international repute. A multidimensional writer, she is also a novelist, a translator, an editor, a film-maker and a literary organizer. She is the recipient of the EASAL, 2018, Paris; the International Poetry Prize Alfonso Gatto, 2016, Italy; and the respected Yehuda-Amichai Prize for Poetry. She has published 11 volumes of poetry, 2 books of prose, and 2 books of translations. She translates the international “poem of the week” from English to Hebrew, every week.
Joanna Chen is a literary translator and essayist. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Mantis, Asymptote and Poetry International, among others. She is the translator of Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books, 2017), Frayed Light (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) and My Wild Garden (Penguin/Random House, 2019). She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches at the Helicon School of Poetry.