Yehuda Amichai is probably the best known Israeli poet in the world. Today, host Marcela Sulak celebrates the recent publication of Robert Alter’s The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai - the largest collection of Amichai’s poetry published in a single volume to date. Alter claims that a complete edition of Amichai’s poetry would be three times larger.
Marcela reads from the end of an epic, autobiographical poem “The Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela”:
"The players sat inside, the talkers on the verandah:
half my love, my left hand, a quarter of a friend,
a man half dead. The sound of the killed pieces
tossed into the wooden box is like distant thunder, heralding evil."
Text:
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Edited by Robert Alter. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Music:
Shimon Bar - Masa'ot Binyamin MiTudela
Albioni - Adagio in G Minor
