The Selected Poetry Of Yehuda Amichai, Newly Revised and Expanded edition (Literature of the Middle East) [Paperback]

Yehuda Amichai (Author), Chana Bloch (Translator), Stephen Mitchell (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 1996 | ISBN-10: 0520205383 | ISBN-13: 978-0520205383 | Edition: Rev Exp Su

Yehuda Amichai is Israel's most popular poet as well as a literary figure of international reputation. In this revised and expanded collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have selected Amichai's most beloved and enduring poems, including forty new poems from his recent work.
from Tourists:Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pieces of laundry hanging from Jerusalem's rooftops serve as signposts distinguishing Arabs from Jews; Amichai's brief lyric crystallizing their mutual hatred would heal the rift, if words could. Israel's best-known poet sifts centuries of Jewish experience in firsthand impressions of his troubled land; moreover, he makes the particular universal. In their remarkable translations, Bloch and Mitchell bring over the poet's healing, wise voice in a modern American idiom that nevertheless remains true to his biblical and cultural roots. Amichai circumscribes the world in a few lines; pain, joy, sorrow, hope press against the reader with the felt weight of experience. Love poems are shot through with an ironic awareness that love is no panacea. In their richness of history, their ever-present political dimension, their sharing of a common frame of reference with their audience, these poems are miles above almost anything in contemporary American verse.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"For sheer energy of imagination, for the constantly renewed sense of poetry's ability to engage reality, Amichai has no close competitors on the Israeli scene, and perhaps only a few worldwide." -- Robert Alter, New York Times Magazine

1924
1978 Reunion Of Palmach Veterans At Ma'ayan Harod
Advice For Good Love
All These Make A Dance Rhythm
Almost A Love Poem
And As Far As Abu Ghosh
And That Is Your Glory
An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion
As For The World
At The Beach
At The Maritime Museum
At The Monastery Of Latroun
At The Seashore
Autobiography, 1952
Autumn Is Near And The Memory Of My Parents
Autumn Rain In Tel Aviv
Ballad In The Streets Of Buenos Aires
Ballad Of The Washed Hair
Before
Beginning Of Autumn In The Hills Of Ephraim
The Body Is The Cause Of Love
The Box
A Bride Without A Dowry
The Bull Returns
A Child Is Something Else Again
Children's Procession
The Course Of A Life
The Diameter Of The Bomb
A Dog After Love
Ecology Of Jerusalem
Elegy
Elegy On An Abandoned Village
The Elegy On The Lost Child
End Of Summer In The Judean Mountains
An Eternal Window
The Eve Of Rosh Hashanah
Evidence
Fall In Connecticut
Farewell
Field Of Sunflowers
First Rain On A Burned Car
A Flock Of Sheep Near The Airport
For My Birthday
Forgetting Someone
From In A Right Angle: A Cycle Of Quatrains
From Summer Or Its End
From The Book Of Esther I Filtered The Sediment
From We Loved Here
Gifts Of Love
God Has Pity On Kindergarten Children
A Great Tranquillity: Questions And Answers
The Greatest Desire
Half The People In The World
Half-sized Violin
Hamadiya
Here
History
The Hour Of Grace
Huleikat--the Third Poem About Dicky
I Feel Just Fine In My Pants
I Guard The Children
I Know A Man
I Lost My Identity Card
I Walked Past A House Where I Lived Once
I've Already Been Weaned
I've Grown Very Hairy
Ibn Gabirol
In A Leap Year
In The Full Severity Of Mercy
In The Garden, At The White Table
In The Middle Of This Century
In The Morning It Was Still Night
In The Old City
Inside The Apple
Instead Of Words
Jacob And The Angel
Jasmine
Jerusalem
Jerusalem Is Full Of Used Jews
Jerusalem, 1967
Jerusalem, 1985
Jews In The Land Of Israel
Kibbutz Gevaram
The Last Word Is The Captain
Late Marriage
A Letter
A Letter Of Recommendation
Like The Inner Wall Of A House
Look: Thoughts And Dreams
Lost Objects
Love Is Finished Again
Love Song
A Luxury
A Man In His Life
A Man Like That On A Bald Mountain In Jerusalem
Mayor
A Mutual Lullaby
My Father In A White Space Suit
My Mother Comes From The Days
My Mother Died On Shavuot
National Thoughts
Near The Wall Of A House
North Of Beersheba
North Of San Francisco
Not Like A Cypress
Now In The Storm
Now She's Breathing
Now The Lifeguards Have All Gone Home
Of Three Or Four In A Room
On Mount Muhraka
On Some Other Planet You May Be Right
On The Day I Left
On The Day My Daughter Was Born No One Died
Orchard
A Pace Like That
The Parents Left The Child
A Pity. We Were Such A Good Invention
The Place Where We Are Right
Poem For Arbor Day
Poem Without An End
Poems For A Woman
A Precise Woman
Psalm
A Quiet Joy
The Real Hero
Relativity
Resurrection
Ruhama
The Rustle Of History's Wings, As They Used To Say Then
Sandals
The Sea And The Shore
Seven Laments For The War-dead: 1
Seven Laments For The War-dead: 2
Seven Laments For The War-dead: 3
Seven Laments For The War-dead: 4
Seven Laments For The War-dead: 5
Seven Laments For The War-dead: 6
Seven Laments For The War-dead: 7
The Shore Of Ashkelon
Six Poems For Tamar
The Smell Of Gasoline Ascends In My Nose
So I Went Down To The Ancient Harbor
A Song Of Lies On Sabbath Eve
Songs Of Continuity
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 11
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 12
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 14
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 15
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 17
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 18
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 2
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 21
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 22
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 23
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 27
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 29
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 3
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 31
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 32
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 34
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 35
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 36
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 37
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 4
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 5
Songs Of Zion The Beautiful: 8
Sonnet From The Voyage
Sort Of An Apocalypse
Statistics
Such As Sorrow
Summer Begins
Summer Evening In The Jerusalem Mountains
The Sweet Breakdowns Of Abigail
There Are Candles That Remember
They Are All Dice
Threading
Through Two Points Only One Straight-line Can Pass
To A Convert
To Bake The Bread Of Yearning
To Carry The Weight Of Heavy Buttocks
To My Love, Combing Her Hair
Too Many
Tourists
Travels Of The Last Benjamin Of Tudela
Try To Remember Some Details
Two Disappeared Into A House
Two Photographs
The U.n. Headquarters In The High Commissioner's House
The Visit Of The Queen Of Sheba
The Way It Was
What A Complicated Mess
What Kind Of Man
When A Man's Far Away From His Country
When I Banged My Head On The Door
When I Have A Stomachache
When I Was A Child
When I Was Young, The Whole Country Was Young
Wildpeace
Yehuda Ha-levi
Yom Kippur
You Are So Small And Slight In The Rain
You Can Rely On Him
You Mustn't Show Weakness
You Too Got Tired
I've Grown Very Hairy
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; Rev Exp Su edition (October 30, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520205383
• ISBN-13: 978-0520205383
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #610,224 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This is =the= translation of =the= Israeli poet March 8, 1998

By Ari Davidow

Format:Paperback

Reading Yehuda Amichai in Hebrew is wonderful. His sense of word is matched only by the way in which his whimsy and depth reflect Israel. But translations in English have been so bad that the translators, editors, and publishers of such editions should probably be exiled to a supermarket in the suburbs where they are forced to listen to Rod McKuen all day. This, on the other hand, is poetry. I attribute the success of this volume to the fact that both Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, the translators, are such outstanding poets and translators in their own rights. A few of my favorite poems are missing, but so many wonderful ones are here; reading them in this English is like discovering them all over again, and discovered how good he is all over again.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Amichai's beautiful map July 21, 2006

By Ann Pai

Format:Paperback

To read Yehuda Amichai in English is to sojourn, yes, in Jerusalem, more, in Amichai's denuded heart -- but to see it all with a crick in my neck, able only to look out the left-hand side of the bus. In this translation of his Selected Poetry, the scenes pass: stone and sand architecture; crowds of workers, soldiers, family members; heaped goods and quiet meals; long loves and fleeting notice. Reading these poems is to sustain explosions of new sense memories, to be consumed with fresh details -- reading the poems in English is to know they harbor still more beauty. Not knowing Hebrew, I can't turn my head to see what incomparable, heartbreaking balance of truth and wish lies out that window.

Amichai's voice is calm, colloquial, casual. The way one might say, "Pardon me, you've dropped your pen," Amichai will say, "And in the big cities, protestors blocked the roads like / a blocked heart, whose master will die..."

So I wonder what I'm not hearing. How must one who makes easy fantastical connections, who sets single nouns and entire memory constructs equal, also play with homonym, rhythm, internal rhyme, with invented words, cousins of ancient words? This is, after all, Amichai--a poet credited with revivification, with re-knitting the bones of Hebrew vernacular. His poetry gave a country a new map into its old language.

Here's Amichai: "At the end of summer I breathe this air / that is burnt and pained. My thoughts have / the stillness of many closed books: / many crowded books, with most of their pages / stuck together like eyelids in the morning."

And Amichai, to a woman: "You had a laughter of grapes: / many round green laughs. / Your body is full of lizards. / All of them love the sun."

In these poems, the acts of watching and describing become one intention, one result. Amichai systematizes little, responds much; sees, and does not sneer; judges, not to dispose but to know. His poems are not slices of life, but core samples.

If you want to learn something about how to love a city and yet not pretend its horrors do not exist, how to cherish a person, yet not omit flawed relationship, read Yehuda Amichai. If you want to read not a declaration of love, but a proof of love, read Amichai. For to observe without flinching, whatever terrors of truth or beauty may appear, and remain steadfast, observing, is a proof of love. "I see everything about you," Amichai says to the city, the seasons, the soldiers, his woman, his father, his God, "and here I am still."

Amichai is not frightened away. He thereby makes it safe for us to look on a terrible world complete.

I suspect that in Hebrew, the one difficulty of these poems would dissipate. In weight, in flavor, the poems are like a rare, nutritive honey -- not a condiment but a dietary staple, heavy, dependable. I suspect that in Hebrew the tone dances, that the phrases don't share a single, though delicious, viscosity, as in English. But who am I to complain of manna?

What survives translation is not the full tour, not a map to Hebrew vernacular. What survives is a map through Amichai. We can navigate by these lines and points, read the poems like the knots of a safety rope -- here -- we descend into the technical truths of war, of loss, and of heretofore unimaginable love.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The most popular poet of Israel May 7, 2005

By Shalom Freedman HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Amichai is the most popular and beloved poet of Israel. His language is at once understandable , and clear, deep and suggestive. He learned from American poetry the colloquial voice and he speaks to his reader in a kind of down-to- earth language which is nonetheless rich with knowledge of Hebrew traditional texts, most prominently the Bible. Amichai writes of the great themes , love and war, and he writes out of his own experience. He writes with reverence and irony both in relation to the people close to him and to the land of Israel. His connection with Jerusalem is special and he presents the many layers of its complex history and identity through his own personal daily meanderings in the city.

He is a humane and profound poetry who while confronting the most painful realities nonetheless presents a voice strongly affirming the value of life.