ABSTRACT
Moses’s poems draw on a multifarious background. Born in Casablanca in 1959, he was raised in Paris until he was ten. His family then moved to Jerusalem, where he stayed throughout his student years, majoring in history at the Hebrew University. In his work, Moses brings this complex cultural, geographical, and linguistic heritage to the fore. Poems in Last News of Mr. Nobody, not to mention his autobiographical novel La Danse de la poussière dans les rayons du soleil (1999), reveal the author’s wide traveling in Europe and his familiarity with still other languages and literatures. One of Moses’s salient concerns is indeed memory. His writing often evaluates the persistence of remembering as opposed to getting on with living in the present. In a more solemn, autobiographical, poem which praises the color yellow, Moses remarks that the words of his poems are not only “jaunes,” but also “légers et réfléchis,” rendered here as “slight and reflexive.”.
