The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

by Yehuda Amichai, Robert Alter (Editor)

Overview

The largest English-language collection to date from Israel’s finest poet

Few poets have demonstrated as persuasively as Yehuda Amichai why poetry matters. One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai created remarkably accessible poems, vivid in their evocation of the Israeli landscape and historical predicament, yet universally resonant. His are some of the most moving love poems written in any language in the past two generations—some exuberant, some powerfully erotic, many suffused with sadness over separation that casts its shadow on love. In a country torn by armed conflict, these poems poignantly assert the preciousness of private experience, cherished under the repeated threats of violence and death.

Amichai’s poetry has attracted a variety of gifted English translators on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s to the present. Assembled by the award-winning Hebrew scholar and translator Robert Alter, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai is by far the largest selection of the master poet’s work to appear in English, gathering the best of the existing translations as well as offering English versions of many previously untranslated poems. With this collection, Amichai’s vital poetic voice is now available to English readers as it never has been before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536589
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Series:	Copenhagen Trilogy Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	686,079
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) is considered to be Israel’s greatest contemporary poet. With his poems available in forty languages, he may be the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King David. Amichai’s work published in English includes Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, Time, The Great Tranquillity, Amen, Open Closed Open, and Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers.

Robert Alter’s scholarly works on subjects ranging from the eighteenth-century novel to contemporary Hebrew and American literature earned him the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times. Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Editorial Reviews

"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." —Ted Hughes on Yehuda Amichai

From the Publisher

…magnificent…Even when [Amichai's] language is at its most elevated and prophetic, humility and an ardent humanity are threaded through the whole of his output. Even in his many poems that begin with the words "I am," there is always the impression that we, both as his readers and fellow travelers in a difficult world, are as much a part of his poetic enterprise as his self…To say that Amichai's language is simple, and closely reflective of everyday speech, flatters all of us who speak every day…The innumerable instances of sheer, imaginative gorgeousness in his poems hardly feel quotidian…Some of us hold fast to the belief that poetry must make things happen, that, in order to matter, it must act upon its readers in vital ways that are sometimes even transformative. The useful and beautiful poetry of Yehuda Amichai can make much happen: It might just make us more compassionate, and more humane, for having read it.

The New York Times Book Review - Rosie Schaap

★ 11/16/2015
Over his long career, Amichai (1924–2000) became the best-known poet of modern Israel and was admired in translation around the world. This mammoth and ably assembled selection combines existing English versions (by Chana Bloch, Stephen Mitchell, Ted Hughes, and others) with new ones by Alter. The book follows Amichai from early adulthood and the founding of Israel, through residences in Jerusalem and on the Mediterranean, through hot war and cold peace, and into old age. As Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California–Berkeley, explains in his compact preface, Amichai’s Hebrew survives translation well even though it is saturated in Biblical and Jewish liturgical cadence. Amichai wrote prolifically, in love and sorrow, about the land and the struggles over it. Yet it may be as a poet of embodied erotic desire that Amichai has had the widest appeal. His love poems will go on being read and studied, cherished and sent as billet-doux. And this casual, open, yet very literary poet seems to have anticipated his fate: “I who lose things describe in passionate words what I love,” Amichai recalled. “I whose house will be razed and whose body will rot/ praise the new houses/ and the bodies still fresh and filled with love.” Agent: Deborah Harris Agency. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly