Yehuda Amichai

A collection of poems by Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai that blend tenderness and irony with religion and love.

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

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 the fate of 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.

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

Poems, in both the original Hebrew and English translation, deal with childhood, life in Israel, Jewish tradition, and history.

מסעות בנימין האחרון מטודלהץ

Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany in 1924. His family left for Israel in 1936. Among the collections of his poetry that have appeared in English are Songs of Jerusalem & Myself, Travels, & The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. He presently lives & teaches in Jerusalem. "He is one of our great poets...once one has heard his quiet, even tones, precise, distanced & passionate, one never forgets them." "I, for one, return to his poetry again & again, & always find myself shaken, as by something truly genuine & alive."

A Bilinggual Edition

Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems

The Early Books of Yehuda Amichai

This collection presents the best short fiction by one of Israel's leading poets. The stories plunge deep into the chasms of sensitivity that mark the human landscape of Israel, weaving through the inner chambers of characters' lives in prose that bristles with the visceral.

The World is a Room and Other Stories

Yehuda Amichai was first brought to attention in this country by his inclusion in the first issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (1965). The magazine's first editors, Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes here provide a selection of Amichai's poetry translated by various hands, which will place his achievement alongside those other Eastern European poets with whom he was first introduced - Herbert, Holub, Popa, Milosz and Voznesensky - while demonstrating what makes his own talent so unique. Ted Hughes described him as 'the poet whose books I still open most often, most often take on a journey, most often return to when the whole business of writing anything natural, real and satisfying, seems impossible. And that after thirty years of feeling the same way about him. The effect his poetry has on me is to give me my own life - to open it up somehow, to make it all available to me afresh, to uncover all kinds of riches in every moment of it, and to free me from my mental prisons'.

Selected Poems

Benjamin Harshav

Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994 offers a comprehensive and timely evaluation of the body of work of one of our most valuable poets in any language. Employing the style and idiom of a post-Modernism--of a twentieth-century artist--and filtering it through the prism of his Israeli and Jewish sensibilities, Amichai's words ifs cosmopolitan, muscular, and ironic. Resounding with the exhilarating of the human encounters--it is brought into the sharper contrast by the ever-present precariousness of Israeli existence. The burden and legacy of this history, and its impact upon modern, secular society, places Amichai's work within a uniquely Israeli landscape--arid, verdant, cruel, and beautiful--while simultaneously transcending national and religious borders. Translated from the Hebrew by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, this volume brings Amichai to his rightful place beside the leading poets of the twentieth century.

A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994

Amen

Shalom Auslander

Tama Janowitz

Susann Cokal

Paisley Rekdal

Dangerous Territory

Broad Street 1. 1

Amichai writes of the language of love, and tea with roasted almonds, of desire and love. Of a Jewish cemetery whose groundskeeper is an expert on flowers and seasons of the year, but no expert on buried Jews; of Russian shirts embroidered in the colors of love and death; of Jerusalem, the city where everything sails: the flags, the prayer shawls, the caftans, the monks' robes, the kaffiyehs, and young women's dresses. The poet tenderly, mischievously, breaks open the grand diction of the revered Jewish verses and supplications and suddenly discovers the light that his own experience casts upon them. Here, the bread of memory and the circuses of forgetting, nostalgia for God and a better world, dust and heat, and tamarisk trees that stand as flight attendants for the next millennium, saying, "You can still get a seat on the third millennium before liftoff." Open Closed Open-poems at once meditative and playful, anxious and full of hope, sung in a language of biblical directness and meaning, that through the microcosm of the everyday give us the gift of the world at large.

Poems

Open Closed Open

In poems marked by tenderness and mischief, humanity and humor, Yehuda Amichai breaks open the grand diction of revered Jewish verses and casts the light of his own experi­ence upon them. Here he tells of history, a nation, the self, love, and resurrection. Amichai’s last volume is one of medi­tation and hope, and stands as a testament to one of Israel’s greatest poets. Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That’s all we are. —from “I WASN’T ONE OF THE SIX MILLION: AND WHAT IS MY LIFE SPAN? OPEN CLOSED OPEN”

Gathers poems about love, loss, war, death, history, family life, and Israel

Yehuda Amichai

Books

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