‘Because of What Is Frozen’: Back to the Classics in the Poetry of Israel Pincas and Walid Khazendar

This chapter examines classical references in the poetic works of Israel Pincas (b. 1935), a Jewish-Israeli poet, and Walid Khazendar (b. 1950), a Palestinian poet from Gaza. Both poets turn to the classical for its promise of distance, tenderness, and sobriety, and thus perform a provocative move vis-à-vis the dominant sensibilities in their individual literary milieus. The common denominator for their projects lies in ideas of ‘Mediterraneanism’ that drive a search for transhistorical breadth through affinities with classical antiquity. These affinities come at the expense of what is labelled ‘lyrical’, ‘political’, and ‘national’ in their respective poetic cultures, and redefine the parameters of these categories.