“It’s here, Peter Cole’s translation of Hayim Nahman Bialik’s famous and infamous poetry about the April 1903 Kishinev pogrom along with a compact selection of the poet’s other visionary, strange, passionate, and mournful works, which are just as striking and durable in altogether different ways. These translations bring us a living voice, nuanced, melodic, orchestrated with touches of rhyme that seem inevitable, less the product of a translator’s will than of the desire of language itself.” —Forrest Gander

ON THE SLAUGHTER

Hayim Nahman Bialik
Selected and translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole

Few poets in the history of Hebrew have possessed the power and prescience of Hayim Nahman Bialik. His body of work opened a path from the traditional Jewish world of Eastern Europe into a more expansive Jewish humanism. In a line that stretches back to the Bible and the Hebrew poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain, he stands out—in the words of Maxim Gorky—as “a modern Isaiah.” He remains to this day an iconic and shockingly relevant poet, essayist, and tutelary spirit.

Translated and introduced by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole, On the Slaughter presents Bialik for the first time in English as a masterful artist, someone far more politically and psychologically unsettling than his reputation as the national poet of the Jewish people might suggest. This compact collection offers readers a panoramic view of Bialik’s inner and outer landscapes—from his visionary “poems of wrath” that respond in startling fashion to the devastations of pogroms and revolutionary unrest to quietly sublime lyrics of longing and withering self-assessment. The volume also includes a sampling of slyly sophisticated verse for children, and a moving introduction that bridges Bialik’s moment and our own.

“Peter Cole—a major poet himself—has mastered the consummate master of contemporary Hebrew letters, rendering him into English, after so many others have tried, with unrivaled clarity, erudition, and multilingual precision. Here is Bialik taking his rightful place in the larger poetic world.”
—Steven J. Zipperstein

For three days only, On the Slaughter is available at 25% off.

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Events for On the Slaughter with Peter Cole

Alan Cheuse Writing Center’s Let’s Talk: International Writers Festival 2025

Monday, September 29th, 6pm
Busboys and Poets 14th & V
2021 14th Street NW, Washington, DC
RSVP here

Tuesday, September 30th, 12pm–7pm
George Mason University
Gillespie Gallery, Art and Design Building 1st Floor
4515 Patriot Circle, Fairfax, VA
Peter Cole will speak at 4:30pm
RSVP here

Other events

Wednesday, October 22nd, 5pm
Yale University
Bingham Hall Library, 8th Floor
300 College Street, New Haven, CT
with Robyn Creswell and Eliyahu Stern
Learn more here

Monday, November 10th, 7pm
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
15 West 16th Street, New York City
with Philip Roth biographer Steven J. Zipperstein
Register here

Read a poem from On the Slaughter

Over Your Heart

The threshold edicts of your hearts are broken
and sullied, and so the demons prance—
and a chorus of clowns, disciples of folly,
within great storm clouds rave.

Can you see who’s waiting there by the door
with a broom? The keeper of the ravaged shrines.
Despair—is coming, and the jubilant pack
will be expelled, swept out: “Move on.”

The last glimmer of your fires will sputter,
your shrines go quiet, the crowds forgotten.
And over your hearts’ barren altar,
desolation’s cat will howl and yawn.

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