The second in an occasional series of post about books and writers yet to hit us in English .This is the epic novel by S Yizhar published in 1958 ,I first came across this after reading his novella Khirbet Khizeh that Granta published I reviewed it here .Days of ziklag it also set in the Israeli war of independence and covers six days of that war ,follows a squad of the defence force and is told in a stream of consciousness style of story telling ,and is based oon a real area of conflict in that war .Now the main reason for it not being translated is probably its size that is 1100 pages in its original Hebrew,this means it would be a bit longer in English as it uses more vowels than Hebrew in its written language .Another is the time to translate It took Peter Nadas Translator Imra Goldstein 5 years to translate Parallel stories a book of similar length and like Hebrew from a language not connect to English in its origins .It is considered the greatest book on this conflict and the best in modern Israeli fiction classic so why hasn’t a publisher taken the dive and translated it ? for more info on S Yizhar here is a link to his wiki page .If anyone knows if rights have been sold and a translation is forth coming I be very interested to know .
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