{"id":11,"date":"2013-10-10T15:51:34","date_gmt":"2013-10-10T19:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/waw-poetry\/?p=11"},"modified":"2013-10-10T15:51:34","modified_gmt":"2013-10-10T19:51:34","slug":"yehuda-amichai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/2013\/10\/10\/yehuda-amichai\/","title":{"rendered":"Yehuda Amichai"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"amichaiwpipe\"<\/a><\/span><\/span>Born in Germany, Yehuda Amichai emigrated to Israel when he was twelve.\u00a0 One of the great love poets of modern times, his poems are at once humorous and filled with grief.<\/p>\n

It is one of Amichai’s richest accomplishments that he, by writing in the modern Hebrew spoken on the streets and in the shops and homes of Israel, helped created a vernacular literature for the new nation.\u00a0 Modern Israel, created largely by European Jewish immigrants, had at the outset a language problem.\u00a0 Immigrants spoke various languages, chief among the Yiddish.\u00a0 But a new nation, a Jewish state, demanded (as the founders of Israel saw it) a language appropriate to a Jewish state.\u00a0 European languages would not suffice: the Jewish homeland should speak Hebrew.\u00a0 But “Hebrew” was basically a classical language, preserved in books and texts; it was not supple enough to deal with the modern world, with all its innovations, technologies, new orientations.\u00a0 So a new language was invented, based on classical Hebrew but formed to meet the needs of a society both religious and secular, both rabbinic and political, both spiritual and commercial.\u00a0 Establishing this new language was a matter not just of shaping it, nor
\neven of teaching people how to speak it: the new language required central texts that would affirm its power, its range, its usefulness, its richness.\u00a0 Just a Dante helped solidify vernacular Italian by choosing to write in the demotic instead of classical Latin, just as Chaucer helped solidify English by writing a great epic in the language of everyday life, so Amichai helped solidify modern Hebrew as a language.\u00a0 Owing in large measure to his example, vernacular Hebrew has become the literary language of Israel, instead of the language of the Bible.<\/p>\n

In Amichai one almost always encounters a delight in figurative language; yet his poems are never pretentious or tedious, since they speak out of the everyday and towards concerns we encounter every day.\u00a0 His great themes are love and loss: he celebrates life with vibrancy and energy and a relish for feeling, yet at the same time he is intensely aware of what is lost as history, both personal and social, shears away from each individual things he or she holds dear.
\nTo hear a stimulating introduction to Yehuda Amichai’s poetry by Professor Huck Gutman of the University of Vermont, click on the photo below:<\/p>\n

\"amichai\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Born in Germany, Yehuda Amichai emigrated to Israel when he was twelve.\u00a0 One of the great love poets of modern times, his poems are at once humorous and filled with grief. It is one of Amichai’s richest accomplishments that he, by writing in the modern Hebrew spoken on the streets and in the shops and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75986],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hebrew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/lrg-modernpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}