״במה עוד לְהַללךָ״

בין שירה לפרוזה

תקציר

This article deals with the question of "Halel" (lyric and psalmic praising) in the oeuvre of the poet, prose writer and essayist Shimon Adaf. A central issue is why, how and to what ends Adaf foregrounds the poem's presence, in its multiple senses and voices within his prose books. A reading of Adaf's corpus reveals the true danger that gnaws at the poem's life span, but at the same time it endows poetry with a forceful presence, specifically, within prose where its varied representations become enactments of multi- vocal transmission. Moreover, Lachman argues that the model of reading and writing offered by Adaf, which is open to new vocal and script performances, challenges the traditional models of Israeli identity and proposes alternative histories. In the context of the prose-poetry dynamics characteristic of modernism in general, Adaf's case is extreme, not only as a poet who chose to write prose, but particularly due to the complex position of the "Halel" in his oeuvre: on the one hand its questioning to the point of bankruptcy; on the other hand, enacting it as a dialogical performance of contemporary poetry and ancient liturgical tradition.