Yehuda Amichai
Encyclopedia
Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet
. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew
.
He was awarded the 1969 Brenner Prize
, 1976 Bialik Prize
, and 1982 Israel Prize
.
, Germany
, to an Orthodox Jewish
family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Petah Tikva
in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach
, the strike force of the Haganah
, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine
. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II
as a member of the British Army
, and in the Negev
on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.
After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem, and became a teacher in Haifa. After the War of Independence, Amichai studied Bible
and Hebrew literature
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955.
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War
. Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963. It was about a young Israeli who was born in Germany, and after World War II, and the war of Independence in Israel, he visits his hometown in Germany,recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi Yitneni Malon, about an Israeli poet living in New York, was published in 1971 while Amichai was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley
. He was a poet in residence at New York University
in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.
Amichai was married twice. First to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, and then to Chana Sokolov; they had one son and one daughter. His two sons were Ron and David, and his daughter was Emmanuella.
He died of cancer
in 2000, at age 76.
and original, often surprising imagery. Like many secular Israeli poets, he struggles with religious faith. His poems are full of references to God and the religious experience., He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism
.
Amichai has been credited with a "rare ability for transforming the personal, even private, love situation, with all its joys and agonies, into everybody's experience, making his own time and place general."
Some of his imagery was accused of being sacrilegious. In his poem "And this is Your Glory" (Vehi Tehilatekha), for example, God is sprawled under the globe like a mechanic under a car, futilely trying to repair it. In the poem "Gods Change, Prayers Stay the Same" (Elim Mithalfim, ha-Tfillot Nisharot la-Ad), God is a portrayed as a tour guide or magician.
Amichai's poem Memorial Day for the War Dead was set to music for solo voices, chorus and orchestra in Mohammed Fairouz
's Third Symphony.
describes Amichai's poetry as a "play of sound." He "builds a strong momentum that moves in free association from word to word, the sounds virtually generating the words that follow in the syntactic chain through phonetic kinship."
Amichai's work was popular in English translation, but admirers of his poetry in the original Hebrew claim his innovative use of the language is lost in translation. Subtle layers of meaning achieved using an ancient word rather than its modern synonym to impart a biblical connotation cannot always be conveyed. In Amichai's love poem In the Middle of This Century, for instance, the English translation reads: "the linsey-woolsey of our being together." The Hebrew term, shatnez
, refers to the biblical taboo on interweaving linen and wool, which a Hebrew reader would grasp as an image of forbidden union.
Literary scholar Boaz Arpaly wrote about the influence of biography on Amichai's poetry: "Literary criticism made the determination long ago that despite the autobiographical character of Amichai's poetry, the individual depicted in it is the typical Israeli everyman, and even in a wider sense, the individual as an individual of the twentieth century (a poetics that interweaves the private with the typically generic)... Amichai routinely conflates biographical details from different times into one poetic framework, and exploits drafts and poetic ideas that were recorded in different periods, for a poem that would be written years later".
Almost every poem by Amichai is a statement about the general human condition and Amichai, in a certain sense, is always a philosophical poet".
He changed his name to Yehuda Amichai("my people lives") around 1946. In her biography of Amichai, literary critic Nili Scharf Gold writes that the idea for the name change, as well as the name "Amichai", came from his girlfriend, Ruth Herrmann, who moved to the United States and then married Eric Zielenziger. Contrary to Gold's claim, Amichai said in an interview that it was his idea to choose the name Amichai: "...it was common at that time to change (foreign) names into Hebrew names... 'Amichai' was a right name, because it was Socialist, Zionist and optimistic."
The only influence this relationship had on his poetry is on one poem "The Rustle of History’s Wings, As They Used to Say" in which he wrote:
Gold also believes that a childhood trauma in Germany had an impact on Amichai's later poetry. She claims in her book that Amichai had an argument with a childhood friend, Ruth Hanover, which led to her cycling home angrily. Ruth was caught in a traffic accident, as a result of which she had to have a leg amputated, and Gold claims that Amichai felt guilt and responsibility. Ruth later died in the Holocaust. Amichai occasionally referred to her in his poems as "Little Ruth". However, in Amichai's account of this episode in his journal, the accident happened some days after his dispute with Little Ruth, and there was no connection between the dispute and the accident:
In an interview Amichai said: "Little Ruth is my Anne Frank", "I found out that she (Little Ruth) was in the last transport in 1944. This knowledge goes with me all the time, not because of guilt." "If there is any guilty feeling it's like the guilt that soldiers feel when they survive the battle while their friends were killed".
Robert Alter wrote about Gold's contention: "Again and again Gold asks why Amichai did not represent his German childhood in his poetry, except fragmentarily and obliquely. The inconvenient fact that his major novel, Not of This time, Not of This Place, devotes elaborate attention to Wurzburg (which is given the fictional name Weinburg) is not allowed to trouble Gold's thesis of suppression, because the book is fiction, not poetry, and hence is thought somehow to belong to a different category in regard to the writer's relation to his early years. But Gold's notion of Amichai's 'poetics of camouflage' rests on an entirely unexamined assumption- that it is the task of the poet to represent his life directly and in full…"
Boaz Arpaly wrote: "Amichai did not hide in his poetry the fact that he was an immigrant and a son of immigrants, but he chose to tell the story of his childhood in his hometown, in his novel Not Of This Time, Not of This Place, and like any other writer, he decided which material of his life will become material to his poetry.. ".
Did Amichai want to become a national poet?... his poetry embodied a silent but piercing revolution against the social and political institutions that enslave the life and happiness of the individual for their need – He should bother so much to build for himself the mythology of a national poet? All the things that Gold thinks he was hiding were not in any contrast to the unique "nationality" embodied in his poetry. I did not find in Gold's book an explanation to the concept 'national poet' but in the first place, this concept appears in her book she is pointing to my article (1997) that says: "of all the poets who began to at the time of Amichai, or in later years, since Alterman there was not a poet more popular than Amichai. In this he is unique. He is probably the only canonic poet read by so many, also by people that do not belong to the Literary Community. In this matter he has no rivals. From this aspect, at least, he may be considered a national poet, a title that does not suite him from any other point of view..." Gold's use of that title is not clear and not responsible."
in 1965. In 1966 he appeared at the Spoleto
poetry festvial with Ezra Pound
, W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda
and others. In 1968, he appeared at the London
Poetry Festival. His first book in English, Selected Poems (1968), was translated by Assia Hughes
, (Hughes' lover and mother to his daughter Shura). Referring to him as "the great Israeli poet," Jonathan Wilson wrote in The New York Times
that he "is one of very few contemporary poets to have reached a broad cross-section without compromising his art. He was loved by his readers worldwide...perhaps only as the Russians loved their poets in the early part of the last century. It is not hard to see why. Amichai's poems are easy on the surface and yet profound: humorous, ironic and yet full of passion, secular but God-engaged, allusive but accessible, charged with metaphor and yet remarkably concrete. Most of all, they are, like the speaking persona in his Letter of Recommendation, full of love: Oh, touch me, touch me, you good woman! / This is not a scar you feel under my shirt. / It is a letter of recommendation, folded, / from my father: / 'He is still a good boy and full of love.' "
In the Times Literary Supplement, Ted Hughes wrote: "I've become more than ever convinced that Amichai is one of the biggest, most essential, most durable poetic voices of this past century – one of the most intimate, alive and human, wise, humorous, true, loving, inwardly free and resourceful, at home in every human situation. One of the real treasures."
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer
, who attended a reading by Amichai at Princeton University
, said that Amichai had moved him. Foer's wife, author Nicole Krauss
, said that her novel The History of Love
was inspired by Amichai's poems.
Amichai's poetry has been translated into 40 languages.
Amichai received an Honor Citation from Assiut University
, Egypt
, and numerous honorary doctorates. He became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1986), and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
(1991). His work is included in the "100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature" (2001), and in a great number of international anthologies such as:"Poems for the Millennium"by J.Rothenberg and P.Joris ,and "100great Poems of the 20th Century" by Mark Strand. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize
several times, but never won. Tufts University
English professor Jonathan Wilson
wrote, "He should have won the Nobel Prize in any of the last 20 years, but he knew that as far as the Scandinavian judges were concerned, and whatever his personal politics, which were indubitably on the dovish side, he came from the wrong side of the stockade."
Amichai left his archives to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
of Yale University.
In 2005, he was voted the 82nd-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet
to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
.
He was awarded the 1969 Brenner Prize
Brenner Prize
The Brenner Prize is an Israeli literary prize awarded annually by the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel and the Haft Family Foundation.It was founded in the name of the author Yosef Haim Brenner and was first awarded in 1945....
, 1976 Bialik Prize
Bialik Prize
The Bialik Prize is an annual literary award given by the municipality of Tel Aviv, Israel for significant accomplishments in Hebrew literature. The prize is named in memory of Hayyim Nahman Bialik. There are two separate prizes, one specifically for "Literature", which is in the field of fiction,...
, and 1982 Israel Prize
Israel Prize
The Israel Prize is an award handed out by the State of Israel and is largely regarded as the state's highest honor. It is presented annually, on Israeli Independence Day, in a state ceremony in Jerusalem, in the presence of the President, the Prime Minister, the Knesset chairperson, and the...
.
Biography
Yehuda Amichai (Ludwig Pfeuffer) was born in WürzburgWürzburg
Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian....
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, to an Orthodox Jewish
Orthodox Judaism
Orthodox Judaism , is the approach to Judaism which adheres to the traditional interpretation and application of the laws and ethics of the Torah as legislated in the Talmudic texts by the Sanhedrin and subsequently developed and applied by the later authorities known as the Gaonim, Rishonim, and...
family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Petah Tikva
Petah Tikva
Petah Tikva known as Em HaMoshavot , is a city in the Center District of Israel, east of Tel Aviv.According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2009, the city's population stood at 209,600. The population density is approximately...
in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach
Palmach
The Palmach was the elite fighting force of the Haganah, the underground army of the Yishuv during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. The Palmach was established on May 15, 1941...
, the strike force of the Haganah
Haganah
Haganah was a Jewish paramilitary organization in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948, which later became the core of the Israel Defense Forces.- Origins :...
, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
as a member of the British Army
British Army
The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
, and in the Negev
Negev
The Negev is a desert and semidesert region of southern Israel. The Arabs, including the native Bedouin population of the region, refer to the desert as al-Naqab. The origin of the word Neghebh is from the Hebrew root denoting 'dry'...
on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.
After discharge from the British Army in 1946, Amichai was a student at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem, and became a teacher in Haifa. After the War of Independence, Amichai studied Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
and Hebrew literature
Hebrew literature
Hebrew literature consists of ancient, medieval, and modern writings in the Hebrew language. It is one of the primary forms of Jewish literature, though there have been cases of literature written in Hebrew by non-Jews...
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ; ; abbreviated HUJI) is Israel's second-oldest university, after the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The Hebrew University has three campuses in Jerusalem and one in Rehovot. The world's largest Jewish studies library is located on its Edmond J...
. Encouraged by one of his professors at Hebrew University, he published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955.
In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War
Yom Kippur War
The Yom Kippur War, Ramadan War or October War , also known as the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the Fourth Arab-Israeli War, was fought from October 6 to 25, 1973, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria...
. Amichai published his first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place, in 1963. It was about a young Israeli who was born in Germany, and after World War II, and the war of Independence in Israel, he visits his hometown in Germany,recalls his childhood, trying to make sense of the world that created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi Yitneni Malon, about an Israeli poet living in New York, was published in 1971 while Amichai was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. He was a poet in residence at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
in 1987. For many years he taught literature in an Israeli seminar for teachers, and at the Hebrew University to students from abroad.
Amichai was married twice. First to Tamar Horn, with whom he had one son, and then to Chana Sokolov; they had one son and one daughter. His two sons were Ron and David, and his daughter was Emmanuella.
He died of cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
in 2000, at age 76.
Poetry
Amichai's poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and with philosophical issues of the meaning of life and death. His work is characterized by gentle ironyIrony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
and original, often surprising imagery. Like many secular Israeli poets, he struggles with religious faith. His poems are full of references to God and the religious experience., He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
.
Amichai has been credited with a "rare ability for transforming the personal, even private, love situation, with all its joys and agonies, into everybody's experience, making his own time and place general."
Some of his imagery was accused of being sacrilegious. In his poem "And this is Your Glory" (Vehi Tehilatekha), for example, God is sprawled under the globe like a mechanic under a car, futilely trying to repair it. In the poem "Gods Change, Prayers Stay the Same" (Elim Mithalfim, ha-Tfillot Nisharot la-Ad), God is a portrayed as a tour guide or magician.
Amichai's poem Memorial Day for the War Dead was set to music for solo voices, chorus and orchestra in Mohammed Fairouz
Mohammed Fairouz
Mohammed Fairouz is an Arab American composer.Having fulfilling many commissions and created a substantial body of frequently performed works, he is considered one of the most sought after composers of the young generation. Fairouz began composing at an early age and studied at the New England...
's Third Symphony.
Language and poetic style
In an interview published in the American Poetry Review, Amichai spoke about his command of Hebrew:"I grew up in a very religious household... So the prayers, the language of prayer itself became a kind of natural language for me... I don't try—like sometimes poets do—to 'enrich' poetry by getting more cultural material or more ethnic material into it. It comes very naturally."Robert Alter
Robert Alter
Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew language and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.-Biography:...
describes Amichai's poetry as a "play of sound." He "builds a strong momentum that moves in free association from word to word, the sounds virtually generating the words that follow in the syntactic chain through phonetic kinship."
Amichai's work was popular in English translation, but admirers of his poetry in the original Hebrew claim his innovative use of the language is lost in translation. Subtle layers of meaning achieved using an ancient word rather than its modern synonym to impart a biblical connotation cannot always be conveyed. In Amichai's love poem In the Middle of This Century, for instance, the English translation reads: "the linsey-woolsey of our being together." The Hebrew term, shatnez
Shatnez
Shatnez is the prohibition in Jewish law derived from the Torah that prohibits the wearing of a fabric containing both wool and linen ; this forbidden mixture is referred to in Judaism as shatnez...
, refers to the biblical taboo on interweaving linen and wool, which a Hebrew reader would grasp as an image of forbidden union.
Literary work
Amichai traced his beginnings as a poetry lover to when he was stationed with the British army in Egypt. There he happened to find an anthology of modern British poetry, and the works of Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. That book inspired his first thoughts about becoming a writer.Literary scholar Boaz Arpaly wrote about the influence of biography on Amichai's poetry: "Literary criticism made the determination long ago that despite the autobiographical character of Amichai's poetry, the individual depicted in it is the typical Israeli everyman, and even in a wider sense, the individual as an individual of the twentieth century (a poetics that interweaves the private with the typically generic)... Amichai routinely conflates biographical details from different times into one poetic framework, and exploits drafts and poetic ideas that were recorded in different periods, for a poem that would be written years later".
Almost every poem by Amichai is a statement about the general human condition and Amichai, in a certain sense, is always a philosophical poet".
He changed his name to Yehuda Amichai("my people lives") around 1946. In her biography of Amichai, literary critic Nili Scharf Gold writes that the idea for the name change, as well as the name "Amichai", came from his girlfriend, Ruth Herrmann, who moved to the United States and then married Eric Zielenziger. Contrary to Gold's claim, Amichai said in an interview that it was his idea to choose the name Amichai: "...it was common at that time to change (foreign) names into Hebrew names... 'Amichai' was a right name, because it was Socialist, Zionist and optimistic."
The only influence this relationship had on his poetry is on one poem "The Rustle of History’s Wings, As They Used to Say" in which he wrote:
"... For five shillings I exchanged the exile name of my fathers for a proud Hebrew name that suited hers. That whore ran off to America and married a man, a spice dealer, pepper, cinnamon, and cardamom, leaving me with my new name and with the war".
Gold also believes that a childhood trauma in Germany had an impact on Amichai's later poetry. She claims in her book that Amichai had an argument with a childhood friend, Ruth Hanover, which led to her cycling home angrily. Ruth was caught in a traffic accident, as a result of which she had to have a leg amputated, and Gold claims that Amichai felt guilt and responsibility. Ruth later died in the Holocaust. Amichai occasionally referred to her in his poems as "Little Ruth". However, in Amichai's account of this episode in his journal, the accident happened some days after his dispute with Little Ruth, and there was no connection between the dispute and the accident:
"I remember that in 1934 the little Ruth accident happened. Days before, we argued a little because I easily gave up the leading part of Yehuda Maccabi in the school show and the son of the headmaster got it. She argued that I had to fight more and not to give up immediately".
In an interview Amichai said: "Little Ruth is my Anne Frank", "I found out that she (Little Ruth) was in the last transport in 1944. This knowledge goes with me all the time, not because of guilt." "If there is any guilty feeling it's like the guilt that soldiers feel when they survive the battle while their friends were killed".
Robert Alter wrote about Gold's contention: "Again and again Gold asks why Amichai did not represent his German childhood in his poetry, except fragmentarily and obliquely. The inconvenient fact that his major novel, Not of This time, Not of This Place, devotes elaborate attention to Wurzburg (which is given the fictional name Weinburg) is not allowed to trouble Gold's thesis of suppression, because the book is fiction, not poetry, and hence is thought somehow to belong to a different category in regard to the writer's relation to his early years. But Gold's notion of Amichai's 'poetics of camouflage' rests on an entirely unexamined assumption- that it is the task of the poet to represent his life directly and in full…"
Boaz Arpaly wrote: "Amichai did not hide in his poetry the fact that he was an immigrant and a son of immigrants, but he chose to tell the story of his childhood in his hometown, in his novel Not Of This Time, Not of This Place, and like any other writer, he decided which material of his life will become material to his poetry.. ".
Did Amichai want to become a national poet?... his poetry embodied a silent but piercing revolution against the social and political institutions that enslave the life and happiness of the individual for their need – He should bother so much to build for himself the mythology of a national poet? All the things that Gold thinks he was hiding were not in any contrast to the unique "nationality" embodied in his poetry. I did not find in Gold's book an explanation to the concept 'national poet' but in the first place, this concept appears in her book she is pointing to my article (1997) that says: "of all the poets who began to at the time of Amichai, or in later years, since Alterman there was not a poet more popular than Amichai. In this he is unique. He is probably the only canonic poet read by so many, also by people that do not belong to the Literary Community. In this matter he has no rivals. From this aspect, at least, he may be considered a national poet, a title that does not suite him from any other point of view..." Gold's use of that title is not clear and not responsible."
Critical acclaim
Amichai poetry in English appeared in the first issue of "Modern Poetry in translation" edited by Daniel Weissbort and Ted HughesTed Hughes
Edward James Hughes OM , more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until...
in 1965. In 1966 he appeared at the Spoleto
Spoleto
Spoleto is an ancient city in the Italian province of Perugia in east central Umbria on a foothill of the Apennines. It is S. of Trevi, N. of Terni, SE of Perugia; SE of Florence; and N of Rome.-History:...
poetry festvial with Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....
and others. In 1968, he appeared at the London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
Poetry Festival. His first book in English, Selected Poems (1968), was translated by Assia Hughes
Assia Wevill
Assia Wevill was a German-born woman who escaped the Nazis, lived in British Palestine and later in Britain, and is best known for her relationship with the English poet Ted Hughes. She killed herself and also her four-year-old daughter Alexandra Tatiana Elise . Six years earlier, Hughes's wife...
, (Hughes' lover and mother to his daughter Shura). Referring to him as "the great Israeli poet," Jonathan Wilson wrote in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
that he "is one of very few contemporary poets to have reached a broad cross-section without compromising his art. He was loved by his readers worldwide...perhaps only as the Russians loved their poets in the early part of the last century. It is not hard to see why. Amichai's poems are easy on the surface and yet profound: humorous, ironic and yet full of passion, secular but God-engaged, allusive but accessible, charged with metaphor and yet remarkably concrete. Most of all, they are, like the speaking persona in his Letter of Recommendation, full of love: Oh, touch me, touch me, you good woman! / This is not a scar you feel under my shirt. / It is a letter of recommendation, folded, / from my father: / 'He is still a good boy and full of love.' "
In the Times Literary Supplement, Ted Hughes wrote: "I've become more than ever convinced that Amichai is one of the biggest, most essential, most durable poetic voices of this past century – one of the most intimate, alive and human, wise, humorous, true, loving, inwardly free and resourceful, at home in every human situation. One of the real treasures."
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close...
, who attended a reading by Amichai at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, said that Amichai had moved him. Foer's wife, author Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her novels Man Walks Into a Room , The History of Love and, most recently, Great House...
, said that her novel The History of Love
The History of Love
The History of Love: A Novel is the second novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published in 2005. The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction.-Plot:...
was inspired by Amichai's poems.
Amichai's poetry has been translated into 40 languages.
Awards and honours
- 1957 – Shlonsky Prize
- 1969 – Brenner PrizeBrenner PrizeThe Brenner Prize is an Israeli literary prize awarded annually by the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel and the Haft Family Foundation.It was founded in the name of the author Yosef Haim Brenner and was first awarded in 1945....
- 1976 – Bialik PrizeBialik PrizeThe Bialik Prize is an annual literary award given by the municipality of Tel Aviv, Israel for significant accomplishments in Hebrew literature. The prize is named in memory of Hayyim Nahman Bialik. There are two separate prizes, one specifically for "Literature", which is in the field of fiction,...
for literature (co-recipient with essayist Yeshurun Keshet) - 1981 – Wurzburg's Prize for Culture (Germany)
- 1982 – Israel PrizeIsrael PrizeThe Israel Prize is an award handed out by the State of Israel and is largely regarded as the state's highest honor. It is presented annually, on Israeli Independence Day, in a state ceremony in Jerusalem, in the presence of the President, the Prime Minister, the Knesset chairperson, and the...
for Hebrew poetry. The prize citation read, in part: "Through his synthesis of the poetic with the everyday, Yehuda Amichai effected a revolutionary change in both the subject matter and the language of poetry." - 1986 – Agnon Prize
- 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France)
- 1994 – Literary Lion Award (New York)
- 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival
- 1996 – NorwegianNorwayNorway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
BjornsonBjornsonBjornson, Bjørnson, Bjørnsen, Björnsson and variations can refer to the following people:Icelanders*Ármann Smári Björnsson, Icelandic footballer *Björn Th...
Poetry Award
Amichai received an Honor Citation from Assiut University
Assiut University
Assiut University is a public university in Asyut, Egypt. The University was established in 1957 to encourage research, education and community services in Upper Egypt.Languages of Instruction are Arabic and English...
, Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, and numerous honorary doctorates. He became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1986), and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
(1991). His work is included in the "100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature" (2001), and in a great number of international anthologies such as:"Poems for the Millennium"by J.Rothenberg and P.Joris ,and "100great Poems of the 20th Century" by Mark Strand. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
several times, but never won. Tufts University
Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university located in Medford/Somerville, near Boston, Massachusetts. It is organized into ten schools, including two undergraduate programs and eight graduate divisions, on four campuses in Massachusetts and on the eastern border of France...
English professor Jonathan Wilson
Jonathan Wilson
Jonathan Wilson is the name of:* Jonathan Wilson , American Psychedelic Folk musician* Jonathan Wilson, former member of the band Eisley* Jonathan Wilson , British sports journalist and author...
wrote, "He should have won the Nobel Prize in any of the last 20 years, but he knew that as far as the Scandinavian judges were concerned, and whatever his personal politics, which were indubitably on the dovish side, he came from the wrong side of the stockade."
Amichai left his archives to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was a 1963 gift of the Beinecke family. The building was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and is the largest building in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books...
of Yale University.
In 2005, he was voted the 82nd-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet
Ynet
Ynet is the most popular Israeli news and general content website. It is owned by the same conglomerate that operates Yediot Ahronot, the country's secondleading daily newspaper...
to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.
Works in English
- A Life of Poetry, 1948–1994. Selected and translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
- Amen. Translated by the author and Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
- Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers: Recent Poems. Selected and translated by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
- Exile at Home. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.
- Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers. Translated by Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
- Love Poems: A Bilingual Edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
- Not of this Time, Not of this Place. Translated by Shlomo Katz. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
- On New Year’s Day, Next to a House Being Built: A Poem. Knotting [England]: Sceptre Press, 1979.
- Open Closed Open: Poems. Translated by Chana BlochChana BlochChana Bloch is an American poet, translator, and scholar. She is a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.-Life and work:...
and Chana Kronfeld. New York: Harcourt, 2000. (Shortlisted for the 2001 International Griffin Poetry PrizeGriffin Poetry PrizeThe Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language....
) - Poems of Jerusalem: A Bilingual Edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
- Selected Poems. Translated by Assia Gutmann. London: Cape Goliard Press, 1968.
- Selected Poems. Translated by Assia Gutmann and Harold Schimmel with the collaboration of Ted Hughes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971.
- Selected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort. London: Faber & Faber, 2000.
- Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Edited and translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Newly revised and expanded edition: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
- Songs of Jerusalem and Myself. Translated by Harold Schimmel. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
- Time. Translated by the author with Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
- Travels. Translated by Ruth Nevo. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1986.
- Travels of a Latter-Day Benjamin of Tudela. Translated by Ruth Nevo. Missouri: Webster Review, 1977.
- The World Is a Room and Other Stories. Translated by Elinor Grumet. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984.
- Killing Him: A Radio Play. Translated by Adam Seelig and Hadar Makov-Hasson. Chicago: Poetry Magazine, July–August 2008.
See also
- List of Israel Prize recipients
- List of Bialik Prize recipientsBialik PrizeThe Bialik Prize is an annual literary award given by the municipality of Tel Aviv, Israel for significant accomplishments in Hebrew literature. The prize is named in memory of Hayyim Nahman Bialik. There are two separate prizes, one specifically for "Literature", which is in the field of fiction,...
Further reading
- Robert AlterRobert AlterRobert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew language and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.-Biography:...
: http://www.tnr.com/article/books/only-man Only a Man, The New Republic, Dec 31, 2008 http://www.tnr.com/article/books/only-man - Adam Seelig: Introduction to "Killing Him," a radio play by Yehuda Amichai, Poetry Magazine, July–August 2008 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=181732
- Boas Arpali: "The Flowers and the Urn" Amichai's Poetry – Structure, Meaning, Poetics, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986
- Boaz Arpali: Patuach, Patuach, Haaretz Jan 16, 2009 http://www.haaretz.com/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?more=1&itemNo=1055858&contrassID=1&subContrassID=18&sbSubContrassID=0
- Nili Scharf Gold: Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet, Brandeis University Press, 2008.
- Boas Arpaly: "The making of Israel National Poet" SHOFAR, winter 2010, Vol. 28 N0 2 pp-213
- Essi Lapon-Kandeslshein: To Commemorate the 70th Birthday of Yehuda Amichai: A Bibliography of His Work in Translation, Ramat Gan (Israel): Institute of the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1994.
- Christian Leo: "Wischen Erinnern und Vergessen" – Jehuda Amichais Roman 'Nicht von jetzt' nicht von hier" im phiosophichen und literarischen Kontexext" Konigshausen&Neumann Wurzburg 2004
- Dan MironDan MironDan Miron is an Israeli literary critic and author. Miron is a Professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the Leonard Kaye Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.-Awards...
: Yehuda Amichai-A Revolutionary With a Father, Haaretz, 3,12,14,October 2005 - Matt Nesvisky: Letters I wrote to you, The Jerusalem ReportThe Jerusalem ReportThe Jerusalem Report is a biweekly print and online newsmagazine that covers political and social issues in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world...
, December 8, 2008 - Yehudit Tzvik:Yehuda Amichai: A Selection of critical essays on his writing, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988
- Lawrence Joseph (Spring 1992). "Yehuda Amichai, The Art of Poetry No. 44". Paris Review.
- The Modern Hebrew Poem ItselfThe Modern Hebrew Poem ItselfThe Modern Hebrew Poem Itself is an anthology of modern Hebrew poetry, presented in the original language, with a transliteration into Roman script, a literal translation into English, and commentaries and explanations....
, 2003, ISBN 0-8143-2485-1 - Chana Kronfeld: "The Wisdom of Camouflage" Prooftexts 10, 1990 pp. 469–491
- Joshua Cohen; "The Poet Who Invented Himself", Forwads.com Sep 4, 2008
- Hana Amichai : "Little Ruth, my Personal Anne Frank" Haaretz, 22,10,2010
- John Felstiner, “Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai: An Exchange between Two Great Poets,” Midstream 53, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2007)
- john Felstiner "Writing Zion" Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai: An Exchange between Two Great Poets, The New Republic, June 5, 2006
- Chana Kronfeld : “Reading Amichai Reading,” Judaism 45, no. 3 (1996): 311–2
- Na'ama Rokem:" German–Hebrew Encounters in the Poetry and Correspondence of Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan", Prooftext Volume 30, Number 1, Winter 2010 E-ISSN: 1086-3311 Print ISSN: 0272-9601
- Robert Alter, Amichai: The Poet at Play, Jewish Review of Books, Vol 2 Nu 2 Summer 2011
External links
- Poetry Foundation bio
- Academy of American Poets bio
- Yehuda Amichai's poetry in English translation at Poems Found in Translation
- Yehuda Amichai's Poetry Introduction to Amichai's poetry, in audio.
- "Yehuda Amichai", Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto: books and writers Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. 2008
- Biography from the international literature festival berlin
- Reading of Yehuda Amichai's "I, May I Rest in Peace" by Chana Bloch
- Excerpts from the translation by Stephen Mitchell
- Podcast audio recording of "Killing Him: A Radio Play by Yehuda Amichai" directed by Adam Seelig, produced by Poetry Foundation in association with One Little Goat Theatre Company.