About Robert

Brief Biography of Robert Friend

By Jean Shapiro Cantu

(Friend's niece and copyright holder)

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.

Robert 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. His poems and translations have appeared in many periodicals, including Poetry, The New York Times, Encounter, The London Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Partisan Review, Ariel, Commentary, The Jerusalem Post, and The Jerusalem Review.

His 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 Leah 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. 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 Ra'hel'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 will co-publish 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.

Awards include the Jeannette Sewell Davis Prize (Poetry, Chicago), 1940. Found in Translation: A Hundred Years of Modern Hebrew Poetry is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Personal: Mr. Friend, who was gay, had many friends in Israel, England and the United States. He was passionately devoted to his large family of cats (who play a prominent role in his poetry). He kept in close touch with his family in the United States, which includes one sister, two brothers, nine nieces and nephews, and nine grand-nieces and nephews.