Yehuda Amichai - Selected Poems (Penguin, 1971).  Translated from the Hebrew by Assia Gutmann and Harold Schimmel with the collaboration of Ted Hughes, and with an Introduction by Michael Hamburger.

ISBN: 0140421416 | 96 pages | PDF & EPUB


YEHUDA AMICHAI (1924-2000) was an internationally acclaimed Israeli poet who was considered by many to be his country's greatest poet.  He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew. He was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, the 1976 Bialik Prize, and the 1982 Israel Prize, in addition to many international honors.  Amichai was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, but never won, and his poetry has been translated into 40 languages.

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 irony 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, and an abiding love of the land.

NOTE: The Selected Poems was one of the first collections to introduce his work to an English audience.  I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the scan but I thought it was important for this small representation of Amichai's poetry to be disseminated.


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, Times Literary Supplement

"He is one of our great poets, a very accessible one. Once one has read his poems, one can never forget them -- there can be so much life in sixteen lines. Yehuda Amichai is a master." -- Octavio Paz

"[Amichai was] 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." -- Jonathan Wilson, New York Times