Article
On the Translator Robert Friend (1913-1998)
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January 18, 2006
About Found in Translation, translated by Robert Friend and edited byGabriel Levin (Menard Press, London 1999), the reviewer Susan Wickes wrote in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 1999:
The language is simple. The images are often startlingly beautiful, leaving me thinking that those of us who were brought up Christian are lucky to have a small share in that Jewish old testament vocabulary of metaphor and myth. And the miracle is that these, often rhymed, poems feel like poems originally written in English. The forms and language are not flamboyant; there is no sense here of one man bending others’ material to his own flavoured tone and idioms and diction, of making earlier material incongruously contemporary; the poems feel, in the best sense, ‘transparent’. As far as I can tell – and I don’t know Hebrew – Friend has indeed had the courage to put ‘new flesh on the same spirit’, and the modesty to prefer these many diverse voices over a translator’s single idiosyncratic voice.
Poet and editor Gabriel Levin wrote about Friend in a special Palestinian-Israeli edition of Modern Poetry in Translation, No. 14 (Winter 1998-99):
Whether translating to honour a friend, or out of a sensed kinship with a poet in the near-distant past, whether to earn one’s daily bread, or out of a simple whim, [his] work accrued. Over several decades Friend published five volumes of translation (including a volume of children’s verse by the Nobel Prize winner S.Y. Agnon, published posthumously). He also left a bulky folder of unpublished translations, mostly from Hebrew, but also including individual poems from Yiddish, German, French and Spanish, as well as a score of translations from Arabic…In sifting through Friend’s translations I found to my delight that the list of Hebrew poets was surprisingly close to being complete in its representation of the best of Hebrew poetry written in the last hundred years.
Friend’s first published volume of verse, Shadow on the Sun, appeared in 1941; other books of poems and translations followed, including Salt Gifts (1964), The Practice of Absence (1971), Selected Poems (1976), Selected Poems of Lea Goldberg (1976), Natan Alterman: Selected Poems (1978), Somewhere Lower Down (1980), Sunset Possibilities and Other Poems by Gabriel Preil (1985), Abbreviations (1994), Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems of Ra’hel (1994) and The Next Room (1995). . A posthumous volume of translations, Found in Translation: A Hundred Years of Modern Hebrew Poetry, edited by Friend's literary executor, Gabriel Levin, was published in 1999 by Menard Press, London, becoming a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. In the fall of 2002, Friend's translation of Natan Alterman's poem, ‘The Third Mother’ was featured in the world premier of composer Sharon Farber's choral version of that poem. In addition, Friend's translation of Rachel's poem ‘Michal’ was included in composer Andrea Clearfield's oratorio, ‘Women of Valor’.
In Spring 2003 Spuyen Duyvil Press, New York and Menard Press, London co-published Friend's Dancing With a Tiger, Poems 1941-1998, edited by Edward Field with introductory essays by Field and Gabriel Levin. Three of the poems from that volume were read by Garrison Keillor on his Writers Almanac show on National Public Radio in January 2003. And over sixty years after his work first appeared in Poetry magazine, that same publication published five of Friend's last poems in March 2003. Links
Yaddo Newsletter
A memoir by poet Edward Field – meeting Friend at Yaddo in 1947, including a photo: see pages 10-12.
Washington Post
Former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove remembers Friend
Writer’s Almanac
Three Friend poems recited by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio in the US.
The Drunken Boat
Friend’s poetry and translations online
Tripod
Complete biographical and bibliographical information, and a memoir about Friend’s poetic family
[Note: for more information about Robert Friend and his work, please contact Jean Cantu, in the US at 202-857-7014 / jcantu@ngs.org and/or Brooklyn College Library Special Collections, Brooklyn, New York, USA, Attn: Marianne Labatto, tel: 718-951-5346.]
Robert Friend, who died in January 1998 in Jerusalem, was one of Israel's most prominent English language poets and translators. He was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian immigrant parents. After studying at Brooklyn College, Harvard and Cambridge, he taught English literature and writing in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Panama, France, England, and Germany. Friend settled in Israel in 1950, where he lived the rest of his life. He taught English and American Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for over thirty years, at the same time becoming well-known as a poet (writing in English) and as a translator of Hebrew poetry.
Robert Friend was responsible for more than 800 translations (from Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, French, Spanish, and German) by more than 40 poets. This is in addition to his own large body of work as an English-language poet, his poems and translations appearing in many periodicals, including Poetry, The New York Times, The London Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Partisan Review, Commentary and more. About Found in Translation, translated by Robert Friend and edited byGabriel Levin (Menard Press, London 1999), the reviewer Susan Wickes wrote in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 1999:
The language is simple. The images are often startlingly beautiful, leaving me thinking that those of us who were brought up Christian are lucky to have a small share in that Jewish old testament vocabulary of metaphor and myth. And the miracle is that these, often rhymed, poems feel like poems originally written in English. The forms and language are not flamboyant; there is no sense here of one man bending others’ material to his own flavoured tone and idioms and diction, of making earlier material incongruously contemporary; the poems feel, in the best sense, ‘transparent’. As far as I can tell – and I don’t know Hebrew – Friend has indeed had the courage to put ‘new flesh on the same spirit’, and the modesty to prefer these many diverse voices over a translator’s single idiosyncratic voice.
Poet and editor Gabriel Levin wrote about Friend in a special Palestinian-Israeli edition of Modern Poetry in Translation, No. 14 (Winter 1998-99):
Whether translating to honour a friend, or out of a sensed kinship with a poet in the near-distant past, whether to earn one’s daily bread, or out of a simple whim, [his] work accrued. Over several decades Friend published five volumes of translation (including a volume of children’s verse by the Nobel Prize winner S.Y. Agnon, published posthumously). He also left a bulky folder of unpublished translations, mostly from Hebrew, but also including individual poems from Yiddish, German, French and Spanish, as well as a score of translations from Arabic…In sifting through Friend’s translations I found to my delight that the list of Hebrew poets was surprisingly close to being complete in its representation of the best of Hebrew poetry written in the last hundred years.
Friend’s first published volume of verse, Shadow on the Sun, appeared in 1941; other books of poems and translations followed, including Salt Gifts (1964), The Practice of Absence (1971), Selected Poems (1976), Selected Poems of Lea Goldberg (1976), Natan Alterman: Selected Poems (1978), Somewhere Lower Down (1980), Sunset Possibilities and Other Poems by Gabriel Preil (1985), Abbreviations (1994), Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems of Ra’hel (1994) and The Next Room (1995). . A posthumous volume of translations, Found in Translation: A Hundred Years of Modern Hebrew Poetry, edited by Friend's literary executor, Gabriel Levin, was published in 1999 by Menard Press, London, becoming a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. In the fall of 2002, Friend's translation of Natan Alterman's poem, ‘The Third Mother’ was featured in the world premier of composer Sharon Farber's choral version of that poem. In addition, Friend's translation of Rachel's poem ‘Michal’ was included in composer Andrea Clearfield's oratorio, ‘Women of Valor’.
In Spring 2003 Spuyen Duyvil Press, New York and Menard Press, London co-published Friend's Dancing With a Tiger, Poems 1941-1998, edited by Edward Field with introductory essays by Field and Gabriel Levin. Three of the poems from that volume were read by Garrison Keillor on his Writers Almanac show on National Public Radio in January 2003. And over sixty years after his work first appeared in Poetry magazine, that same publication published five of Friend's last poems in March 2003. Links
Yaddo Newsletter
A memoir by poet Edward Field – meeting Friend at Yaddo in 1947, including a photo: see pages 10-12.
Washington Post
Former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove remembers Friend
Writer’s Almanac
Three Friend poems recited by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio in the US.
The Drunken Boat
Friend’s poetry and translations online
Tripod
Complete biographical and bibliographical information, and a memoir about Friend’s poetic family
[Note: for more information about Robert Friend and his work, please contact Jean Cantu, in the US at 202-857-7014 / jcantu@ngs.org and/or Brooklyn College Library Special Collections, Brooklyn, New York, USA, Attn: Marianne Labatto, tel: 718-951-5346.]
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