11:09 PM Sun, Jun 14, 2009 | Permalink
By Sheila Lennon  Email this author | Email this entry |
Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News. New York's Jewish Daily Forward reports,
It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel's finest authors and poets to cover the day's news.
The idea behind the paper's June 10 special edition was to honor Israel's annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to get away from their forthcoming novels and letting them bear witness to the events of the day.
This wasn't a Sabbath supplement, a chance to balance the news with extra color. This was a near complete replacement of the newspaper itself. Save for the sports section and a few other articles, all the reporters' notebooks were handed over to poets and novelists, both bestselling and up-and-coming. Their articles filled the pages, from the leading headline to the weather report.
They didn't cover cops and courts. Some samples from "The Writers' Haaretz":
Love in the cancer ward By Yoram Kaniuk
Integration at the giraffe enclosure By Shahar Magen
Alon Hilu / Who goes to holy men's graves in Israel?
Barak to Haaretz: Netanyahu's government will surprise people yet
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They did cover cops and courts. Simply, the English version includes only about a third of the whole project
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Thanks for that news, Yanir. Now that this has caught a lot of imaginations, could the rest of the project be translated?
I'd expect the features to be good, but I'd love to see whether poets cover cops and courts differently.
(I tried to email this to yanir but the email address bounced.)
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Sorry about the mail, my fault. They had three writers covering the courts, and one of them, Ram Oren, was really different, very imaginative. But I'm not sure thay'll translate all this, because after all they cater to a Hebrew readership.
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