Hebrew Writers on Writing

Hebrew Writers on Writing offers a fresh look at well-known figures such as Haim Nahman Bialik and Yehuda Amichai, while also introducing a host of fascinating yet little- or never-before translated writers. Drawing from essays, letters, notebooks, poems, interviews, and other sources, it begins in early 20th-century Warsaw, wanders through the formative years of Hebrew modernism in Europe and Palestine, and explores the charged complexity of contemporary Israel. In the process, it probes, as no English-language volume has before, the shifting cultural and political landscape Hebrew emerged from, providing readers with an intimate vision of a startlingly rich and diverse body of work. These selections from 49 writers have been rendered by a group of some of the finest English translators in the field, and each piece is introduced by editor, noted poet, and MacArthur fellow Peter Cole.

Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Academy of American Poets Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. His second collection, Wild Gratitude, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His recent poetry collections include The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, Special Orders, Lay Back the Darkness, On Love, Earthly Measures, and The Night Parade.

He is also the author of the prose books The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, Responsive Reading, and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which poet Garrett Hongo called “the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection” and “a wonderful book for laureate and layman both.” Most recently, Hirsch published Poet’s Choice, which collects two years’ worth of his weekly essay letters from the Washington Post Book World.

Hirsch’s honors include the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and he lives in New York. (Edward Hirsch)

Peter Cole was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2007. His most recent book of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. His many volumes of translations include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, J’Accuse, by Aharon Shabtai, and So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971–2005, by Taha Muhammad Ali. Cole is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize for Poetry and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. (Peter Cole)