• Greetings from Angelus: Selected Poems
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Archipelago Books

Greetings from Angelus: Selected Poems

Greetings from Angelus: Selected Poems

by Gershom Scholem, translated from the German by Richard Sieburth

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One of the twentieth century’s most maverick scholars of religion, Gershom Scholem introduced the study of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism into the academy—and into modern Jewish literature, philosophy, and the arts as a whole. This annotated, bilingual volume contains the German poetry that he wrote for the most part in private or addressed to a few selected friends, such as Walter Benjamin. His verse registers his lifelong disappointment with the eventualities of Zion, caught as it is at every point in a fraught dialectic of messianic hope and despair.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780914671978
Pages: 150
Publication Date:

Praise

Clearly among the great intellectual historians of the last century... Among those generally traditional in qualities, the best is Amtliches Lehrgedicht, which Richard Sieburth, a champion in this turf, translates as The Official Abcedarium. Neat, concise, and, zany to a degree typical of proto-Dada Berlin avant-garde writers, Amtliches Lehrgedicht was given to Benjamin... [and] belongs in the canonical anthologies of modern German poems.
—Richard Kostelanetz, Rain Taxi

Greetings from Angelus offers an aspect of Scholem's own communing with the spirit of language that will be new even to those quite familiar with his works in philology and history of religion...the verses collected here were acts of private devotion.
—Erica X Eisen, Threepenny Review

Gershom Scholem's scholarship was of [the] rare, life-giving kind. Not only have his studies of the Kabbalah altered ... the image of Judaism--but his explorations, translations, and presentations of Kabbalistic writings exercise a formidable influence on literary theory at large, on the ways in which non-Jewish and wholly agnostic critics and scholars read poetry.
—George Steiner, The New Yorker

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