Poet and translator Fiona Sampson chaired this session which took us into the worlds of two very special poets. Amir Or combines the mysteries of the spirit with the joys of the flesh, curious about mythology while carefully examining the Hebrew language. Ted Hughes considered Elaine Feinstein ‘an extraordinarily fine poet. She has a sinewy, tenacious way of penetrating and exploring her subject that seems to me unique. There is nothing hit or miss, nothing for effect, nothing false....

Poets and translators Elaine Feinstein, Amir Or and Daniel Weissbort led poetry translation workshops from Hebrew, Russian and French. People came and discovered the quandaries translators experience when trying to convey music and meaning from a foreign language into English.

Elaine Feinstein and Joseph Sherman write about Jewish writers in Stalin’s Russia. In The Russian Jerusalem, her lyrical novel about history, memory and love, Feinstein concentrates on Marina Tsvetaeva and her contemporaries who had chosen to write in Russian. In From Pogrom to Purge, Sheman recounts the dramatic trial and murder in 1952 of 13 major Yiddish writers, putting an end to Yiddish culture in Russia.

Elaine Feinstein has been an academic, a novelist, a playwright, a biographer and a translator, but it is for her poems that she is best-known. Her new long-awaited collection of poems looks back at her life and the many fascinating people she has encountered. Elaine Feinstein’s will be talking about both her poetry and her life with fellow-poet and publisher Michael Schmidt, author of The Novel: A Biography.