Futureman

David Avidan was himself a Futureman, a self-described "Galactic Poet" and radical individualist known for his innovative use of Hebrew both on the page and in his performances and films. Recognized by the New York Times as one of the poets that "helped the biblical tongue evolve into a modern, living language," Avidan played in his work with lexical and syntactical innovations, neologisms, various registers of Hebrew throughout its history, and colloquial speech, which he believed deserved its place in poetry. Ever the innovator, in 1974 he even conducted a poetic dialogued with a computer. Futureman, in Tsipi Keller's virtuosic translation, introduces selections from across Avidan's groundbreaking oeuvre to English-language readers for the first time.

Poet, translator, painter, filmmaker, playwright, and publisher David Avidan (1934-1995) was born in Tel Aviv, where he lived and worked. A major force in contemporary Hebrew poetry and a leading innovator and artist, Avidan published nineteen books of poetry, as well as plays and children's books. His work has been translated into twenty languages, and collections of his poems have been published in Arabic, French, and Russian. He wrote and directed four short films, including “Sex,” which was shown at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1971. He translated plays by Chekhov, Brecht, and Friedrich Schiller, as well as Hamlet, and the play adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish. His Collected Poems, in four volumes, was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Bialik Institute in 2009-2011. Among his awards, he won the Abraham Woursell Award from the University of Vienna, the Bialik Award, and the Prime Minister Award.

The author of nine books, Tsipi Keller was born in Prague, raised in Israel, and has been living in the United States since 1974. She is the recipient of several literary awards, including National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowships, New York Foundation for the Arts awards in fiction, and an Armand G. Erpf translation award from Columbia University. Her collections of poetry in translation include Dan Pagis’s Last Poems (QRL, 1993); Maya Bejerano’s The Hymns of Job and Other Poems (a Lannan Translation Selection, BOA Editions, 2008), Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY Press, 2008), Raquel Chalfi's Reality Crumbs (SUNY Press, 2015), and Erez Bitton's You Who Cross My Path (BOA Editions, 2015).