Product Description

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."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #408123 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10-30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .62" h x 6.07" w x 8.91" l, .72 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

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.

Robert Alter, New York Times Magazine
"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."

From the Inside Flap
"Yehuda Amichai's splendid poems, refined and cast in the desperate foundries of the Middle East, where life and faith are always at stake, exhibit a majestic and Biblical range of the topography of the soul."--Anthony Hecht