Aharon Amir


Aharon Amir was an Israeli Hebrew poet, a literary translator and a writer.

Biography

Aharon Amir was born in Kaunas, Lithuania. He moved to Palestine with his family in 1933 and grew up in Tel Aviv. His father,
Meir Lipec, was later director of the publishing house Am Oved. He attended Herzliya [Hebrew High School|Gymnasia Herzliya] high school. At the time of the British Mandate in Palestine, while studying Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University, Amir was a member of the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds as well as a founding member of the Canaanite movement, which saw Hebrew or Israeli culture as defined by geographical location rather than religious affiliation. Amir was married to Bettine, a poet and painter. He had three children from a previous marriage.
He died of cancer on February 28, 2008, at the age of 85, and left his body to science.

Literary career

Amir translated over 300 books into Hebrew, including English and French classics by Melville, Charles Dickens, Camus, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Emily Brontë and O. Henry. He also translated works by Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. He founded and edited the literary magazine Keshet, which he closed in 1976 after eighteen years of publication to concentrate on his own writing. In 1998, the magazine was revived as The New Keshet.
He was often known in Israel thanks to a popular song by Meir Ariel, which cited Amir's translation of Hemingway's Islands in the Stream.

Awards and recognition

Publications

Books Published in Hebrew

Qadim, Machbarot Lesifrut, 1949 Love, Machbarot Lesifrut, 1951 And Death Shall Have No Dominion, Zohar, 1955 Seraph, Machbarot Lesifrut, 1956 Nun, Massada, 1969-1989 Yated, Levin-Epstein, 1970 Prose, Hadar, 1972 A Perfect World, Massada, 1975 A Separate Peace, Massada, 1979 Aphrodite or the Organized Tour, Ma'ariv, 1984 Heres, Zmora Bitan, 1984 The Clouds Return After the Rain, Bialik Institute/Machbarot Lesifrut, 1991 Aaron's Rod, Zmora Bitan, 1996 The Villains, 1998

Books in Translation