- Person
- Yehuda Amichai
- Lived
- 1924–2000
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- German-born Israeli
The story
When Yehuda Amichai began publishing in the 1950s, Hebrew poetry was still largely written in an elevated, formal style, drawing on the language of the Bible and classical texts. Amichai, who had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Germany and come to Palestine as a boy, knew that language intimately; he later said the words of prayer had become a kind of natural language for him. But he also loved modern English poetry. While stationed with the British Army in Egypt during the Second World War, he had found an anthology of modern British verse, with poems by Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and it first made him think of becoming a writer.
Encouraged by one of his professors at the Hebrew University, he published his first collection, Now and in Other Days (Achshav Uve-Yamim HaAharim), in 1955. It aroused serious interest among readers and critics alike.
Amichai was one of the first poets in modern times to write in colloquial Hebrew. Subjects once thought too prosaic for poetry, such as tanks, aeroplanes, fuel, administrative contracts and technical terms, became images in his hands, reflecting his conviction that modern poetry must confront the contemporary world. Mixing layers of the language from classical Hebrew to everyday speech, he became known as the poet who plays with words. He coined new idioms and slang, worked prose phrases into his verse, and wrote with the wit, irony and understatement he admired in English poets.
His approach transformed Hebrew poetry. The Jewish Virtual Library credits his influence with helping to create a modern Israeli poetry. Books followed in rapid succession, along with Collected Poems in 1963 and Selected Works in 1981, and his 1982 Israel Prize citation praised the revolutionary change in poetry's language that his work had begun.
He also reached an unusually wide public. The critic Boaz Arpaly has written that no poet since Natan Alterman had been as popular in Israel, and that Amichai was probably the only canonical poet read by so many people outside the literary world.
Why it matters
Amichai's everyday Hebrew made poetry accessible to ordinary Israelis and helped shape the voice of modern Israeli literature.
About Yehuda Amichai
Würzburg-born soldier-poet who wrote modern Israel’s love, war and doubt in everyday Hebrew, becoming its most widely read and translated poet.
More about Yehuda Amichai
- Yehuda Amichai's novel faced his German childhoodYehuda Amichai's 1963 novel Not of This Time, Not of This Place follows a young Israeli born in Germany, drawing on the poet's own life.
- Amichai's Open Closed Open was praised as deeply spiritualYehuda Amichai's late book Open Closed Open won high praise from poet Anthony Hecht, who called it as deeply spiritual a poem as any he had read in modern times.
- Many of Yehuda Amichai's poems were set to musicMany of Yehuda Amichai's poems have been set to music, by composers including Mohammed Fairouz and Benjamin Wallfisch.
- Amichai's poems were translated into some 40 languagesYehuda Amichai's poetry has been translated into some 40 languages, and Ted Hughes called him one of the most essential poetic voices of the century.
- Yehuda Amichai taught literature in Israel and abroadYehuda Amichai taught literature at an Israeli teachers' seminary and to students from abroad at the Hebrew University, and was poet in residence at New York University in 1987.
Sources
- Yehuda Amichai Jewish Virtual Library
- Yehuda Amichai Wikipedia
- Yehuda Amichai Academy of American Poets
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