Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai
File:Yehuda amichai.jpg
Born	3 May 1924 (1924-05-03)  Würzburg, Germany
Died	22 September 2000 (2000-09-23)  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 within Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew. Israel's most widely read poet, he received the Israel Prize for Literature in 1982. 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."

Life

Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. According to literary scholar Nili Scharf Gold, a childhood trauma in Germany had an impact on his later poetry: he had an argument with a childhood friend of his, Ruth Hanover, that caused her to bicycle home angrily; she fell and as a result had to get her leg amputated. Several years later, she was unable to join the rest of her family, who fled the Nazi takeover, due to her missing leg, and ended up being killed in the Holocaust. Amichai occasionally referred to her in his poems as "Little Ruth".

Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 12 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He first worked as a physical education teacher. 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 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.

Amichai traced his beginnings as a writer 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 serious thoughts about becoming a writer.

Amichai began writing poetry in 1946, at age 22. He also changed his name to Yehuda Amichai around that same time. According to Nili Scharf Gold, the idea for the name change, as well as the specific last name "Amichai", came from his girlfriend at the time, whom he has called "Ruth Z.", and who soon afterward broke up with him and moved to the United States. According to Gold, Amichai later claimed that he only started writing poetry in 1948, partly as a way of hiding from the public record this portion of his life.

Following 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 died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.

Awards and accolades

Amichai won the Shlonsky Prize (1961), the Brenner Prize (1969),the Bialik Prize (1976), Wurzburg`s Prize for Culture (Germany, 1981), the Israel Prize (1982), the Agnon Prize (1986), the Malraux Prize (France, 1994), the Literary Lion Award (New York, 1994), Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award (1995), the Norwegian Bjornson Poetry Award(1996), 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`s archives are kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.

Personal life

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.

Poetry

His poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and is not as overtly literary as Hebrew poets such as Hayyim Nahman Bialik. His work is characterized by gentle irony and the pain of damaged love in every sense.

Many of his songs and poems include quotes from the Torah.

Critical acclaim

Amichai was "discovered" in 1965 by Ted Hughes, with whom he was to collaborate in the translation of his poetry. Amichai subsequently published two books of poetry: "Amen" in 1977 and "Time" in 1979. The first ever translation of Amichai's poetry Selected Poems (1968) was translated by Assia Wevill (nee Guttman), Hughes' lover and mother to his daughter Shura. Her translations drew wide critical acclaim. 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.' "

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.

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.

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.
• Robert Alter, "Only A Man" The New Republic, December 31 2008
• 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

External links

• Academy of American Poets bio
• Yehuda Amichai's Poetry Introduction to Amichai's poetry, in audio. Many links.
• Yehuda Amichai 1924-2000 tribute at The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature
• 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
• Robert Alter, "Only A Man" The New Republic, December 31 2008

References

*Robert Alter, "Only A Man" The New Republic, December 31 2008