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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

Producer: Laragh Widdess
Technical producer: Alex Benish