Natan Zach was a leading Israeli poet, translator, and literary critic. Considered by some to be the most influential poet of Israel's Statehood Generation, Zach helped to change the face of modern Hebrew poetry in the 1950s and 60s. Internationally acclaimed, He has been called “the most articulate and insistent spokesman of the modernist movement in Hebrew poetry.” His poetry was known for its remarkable craftsmanship, as well as his groundbreaking use of colloquial Hebrew and his use of non-religious allusions.

Zach was born Harry Seitelbach in Berlin in 1930 to an Italian Catholic mother and a German Jewish father and fled Nazi Germany to the British Mandate of Palestine with his family when he was five. He published his first poem in 1951, and two years later he earned a BA from Hebrew University. Zach was a lecturer at several universities in Haifa and Tel Aviv, before he moved to England to earn his PhD from the University of Essex. He returned to Israel, where he worked as Artistic Co–Director of the Ohel Theatre and taught at Tel Aviv University, before later becoming a professor at the University of Haifa. His awards include the Bialik Prize for literature, the Feronia Prize, and the Israel Prize for Hebrew poetry. A respected translator, Zach translated texts from German and English to Hebrew, including the poetry of Allen Ginsberg.

Zach published many collections of poetry, and several volumes of prose and children’s literature. His last books included The nightingale no longer lives here (2004), The Needle Monkey (2004), All the songs and new songs (2008), From year to year (2009), From the place where we were not to the place where we will not be (2013), and They say it's really beautiful there (2016). Remarkably, only three of Zach's titles were translated into English: Against Parting (1967), The Static Element: Selected Poems (1983), and The Countries We Live In: Selected Poems 1955-1979 (2011). As a result, he is less known among English readers. Some critics argue that this is due to the difficulty and nuances of Zach’s poetry, which is harder to capture in other languages.

Zach was also known for his left-wing politics, though he stoked controversy on both sides. In 1988 he resigned from the International Poetry Festival, which was to celebrate Israel’s 40th anniversary, due to acts of the Israeli government that he felt "may only be described as State Terror.” In 2010, Zach made derogatory comments about the culture of Middle Eastern Jews and supported an activist flotilla that defied Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which led to calls in Israel for his writings to be removed from school textbooks. He died in 2020 at the age of 89.

poetry-magazineTo Put It Differently

To Put It Differently