Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 5, 2007|Volume 36, Number 5

Conference to honor legacy of Israeli poet

Yale will host an international conference Saturday-Sunday, Oct. 20-21 celebrating the life and work of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

The conference, “Poetics and Politics in Yehuda Amichai’s World,” is free and open to the public. Sessions will take place in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.

Amichai, considered one of the great poets of modern times, has been praised for the depth and complexity of his language as well as its accessibility, even in translation from the original Hebrew. His books were best sellers in Israel, and in the years before his death, he enjoyed the status of a celebrity.

Benjamin Harshav, the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale, will deliver the keynote address, “Political Discourse and Situational Cognition in Amichai’s Poetry,” on Oct. 20 at 8:30 p.m. Harshav, one of Amichai’s chief translators, was also a close friend of the poet for 50 years.

According to Harshav, “Amichai is the most universal Israeli poet, expressing the human condition. … In an age of ideology, he celebrated the individual’s private moments and existential situation; in an age of war, he celebrated love and love-making.”

Speakers and topics on Oct. 21 will include Robert Alter, University of California-Berkeley (UC-Berkeley), “Yehuda Amichai: At Play in the Fields of Verse”; Menakhem Perry, Tel Aviv University, “Facing the Dead: The New Poetics of the Young Amichai”; and Chana Kronfeld, UC-Berkeley, “Making Honey from all the Buzz and Babble: Translation as Metaphor in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.” Other speakers will include Boaz Arpaly, Michael Gluzman and Ziva Ben Porat from Tel Aviv University, and Vered Shem-Tov from Stanford University.

The final session will be a roundtable discussion presented by William Cutter, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion; Barbara Harshav and Geoffrey Hartman, Yale; Barbara Mann, Jewish Theological Seminary; and Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic. Amichai’s wife Hana and daughter Emanuella will also be present.

Amichai (1924-2000) was born in Würzburg, Germany, and immigrated to Palestine with his family at the age of 12. He served in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade during World War II and then joined the Palmach, an underground Jewish military organization in Palestine. When the State of Israel was established in 1948, he fought in the Israeli army during the War of Independence.

Amichai’s first book of poetry, “Now and in Other Days,” was published in 1955. His writings, which include plays, stories, a novel, essays and three children’s books as well as several volumes of poetry, have been translated into more than 30 languages. Many are available in English, including two books translated by British poet Ted Hughes (“Amen” and “The Early Books”) and two translated by his friends Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, “Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers” and “Yehuda Amichai, a life of poetry, 1948-1994.” His last volume of poetry was “Open Closed Open: Poems,” 2000, translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.

Shortly before his death, Amichai arranged for Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to receive his extensive personal papers and literary archive. The Amichai papers were the first archive of a major writer in Hebrew to be added to the Beinecke, where they join an extensive international gathering of 20th-century literary archives, including the papers of the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch and poets Ezra Pound, F.T. Marinetti, William Carlos Williams and Czeslaw Milosz.

“Yale is privileged to have the Yehuda Amichai Papers in the Beinecke Library along with the archives of many other great poets of the 20th century” says Nanette Stahl, conference coordinator. “The conference is a way to celebrate Amichai and acknowledge his contribution to modernist poetry.”

The Amichai conference is sponsored by the Yale University Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund.

In addition to Stahl and Harshav, the organizers include Paul Fry, the William Lampson Professor of English; Paula Hyman, the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History; Ivan Marcus, the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History and chair of the Program in Judaic Studies; and Kevin Repp, curator of modern books and manuscripts, Beinecke Library.

For further information, contact Stahl at (203) 432-7207 or nanette.stahl@yale.edu. The conference website is www.library.yale.edu/judaica/Amichai/index.html.

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