Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai
File:Yehuda amichai.jpg
Born	(1924-05-03)3 May 1924 Würzburg, Germany
Died	22 September 2000(2000-09-22) (aged 76) Israel

Yehuda Amichai (born Ludwig Pfeuffer; Hebrew: יהודה עמיחי; May 3, 1924 – September 22, 2000) 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.

Biography

Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.

Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 12 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defence force of the Jewish community in pre-state Israel. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a member of the British Army Jewish Brigade, and in the Negev on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.

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. Later, he was poet in residence at numerous universities, including Berkeley, NYU, and Yale.

In 1956, Amichai served in the Sinai War, and in 1973 he served in the Yom Kippur War. He later became an advocate of peace and reconciliation in the region, working with Arab writers. He 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.

Poetry

Amichai's poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and also with philosophical issues of the meaning of life and death. His work is characterized by gentle irony and is rich with original and surprising imagery. At a ceremony in honor of Yitzhak Rabin on the occasion of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Amichai read out the following poem:

"Half the people in the world love the other half, half the people hate the other half. Must I, because of this half and that, go and wander and ceaselessly change, like rain in its cycle, and sleep among rocks and become rugged like the trunks of olive trees, and hear the moon bark at me, and camouflage my love with worries, and grow like frightened grass between the railroad tracks, and live underground like a mole, and be with roots and not with branches, and not rest my cheek upon the cheek of angels, and make love in the first of the caves, and marry my wife beneath a canopy of beams that support the earth, and act out my death, unto the last breath and the last words, always and without understanding, and put flagpoles atop my house and a bomb shelter underneath. And set forth on those roads made only for returning, and go through all the terrifying stations — cat, stick, fire, water, butcher — between the kid and the Angel of Death?

Half the people love, half the people hate. And where is my place between such well-matched halves? And through what crack shall I see the white housing projects of my dreams, and the runners barefoot on the sands or, at least, the flutter of the girl’s kerchief, by the hill?"

Critical acclaim

Amichai poetry in English appeared in the first issue of "Modern Poetry in translation" edited by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, in 1965. In 1966 he was invited by Karlo Menoti to read poetry in the fesival of Spoleto with Octavio Pass, Allan Ginsburg, Ezra Pound, W.H.Auden,Pablo Neruda and others. . In 1968 he was invited to read in The London Poetry Festival . His first translated book into English Selected Poems (1968) was translated by Assia Wevill (née Guttman), (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.' "

Amichai's friend and translator Ted Hughes wrote, in the Times Literary Supplement, "I've become more than ever convinced that Amichai is one of the biggest, most essential, most durable poeticvoices of this past century - one of the most intimate, alive and human, wise, humourous, true, loving, inwardly free and resourceful, at home in every human situation. One of the real treasures."

Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer has said that he was directly inspired by seeing a reading by Amichai while Foer was a student at Princeton University, with the desire "to somehow move somebody" the way Amichai had moved him. Foer's wife, author Nicole Krauss, has written that parts of her 2005 novel The History of Love were inspired by Amichai's poems.

Amichai's poetry has been translated into 40 languages.

Literary influences

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 included in that book inspired his first thoughts about becoming a writer.

Awards

• 1961 - Shlonsky Prize;
• 1969 - Brenner Prize;
• 1976 - Bialik Prize;
• 1981 - Wurzburg`s Prize for Culture (Germany);
• 1982 - Israel Prize 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 - the Agnon Prize;
• 1994 - the Malraux Prize (France);
• 1994 - the Literary Lion Award (New York);
• 1995 - Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award;
• 1996 - the Norwegian Bjornson Poetry Award.

Amichai he 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 Distinguished Associate Fellow 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. 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.

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 Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. New York: Harcourt, 2000. (Shortlisted for the 2001 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
• 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.

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients

Bibliography

• Lapon-Kandeslshein, Essi. 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.
• Boas Arpali, "The Flowers and the Urn" Amichai's Poetry - Structure, Meaning, Poetics) Hkibutz Hameuchad, 1986
• Yehuda Amichai "A Selection of critical essays on his writig, Hakibutz Hamejchd, 1988
• The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself. 2003, ISBN 0-8143-2485-1
• Nili Scharf Gold. Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet. Brandeis University Press, 2008.
• Alter, Robert (December 31, 2008), "Only A Man", The New Republic
• Matt Nevisky," Letters I Wrote to you",The Jerusalem Report, December 8,2008
• Boaz Arpali ,"Patuach Patuach" Haaretz, January 16,2009
• Dan Miron "Yehuda Amichai- Mahapechan im Aba" Haaretz ' October 3, 12, 14 2005
• Christian Leo "Zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen" Konigshausen& Neumann, Wurzburg, Germany 2004

External links

• Academy of American Poets bio
• Yehuda Amichai's Poetry Introduction to Amichai's poetry, in audio.
• Yehuda Amichai
• 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