“Obituary: Robert Friend”

by Anthony Rudolf

TheIndependent, January 22, 1998

RobertFriend, poet and translator: born New York 25 November 1913;died Jerusalem 12 January 1998.

Robert Friendwas an outstanding translator of modern Hebrew poets. Hisactive Hebrew was serviceable but not brilliant, but his passive Hebrew wasgood enough to work in tandem with brilliant Hebrew scholars like ShimonSandbank (whose own translation of Chaucer has become a surprise bestseller inIsrael) on translations of books by the two major women poets of Israel and theYishuv (pre-state Palestine), Leah Goldberg and Ra’hel, as well as books byNatan Alterman, Gabriel Preil and the Nobel prizewinner S.J. Agnon.

There were many translations of otherpoets published in periodicals, and from Yiddish and other languages as well asHebrew. It is notable that this proud gay poet’s major work as a translator wasof women. Love poets, and often unhappy (to put it mildly), they spoke to thevery depths of Robert Friend. It may be that even the most gendered poetry isfinally androgynous.

Like many distinguished poetrytranslators in a golden age of translation (Michael Hamburger, JonathanGriffin, Keith Bosley and Dan Weissbort are English examples), Friend enduredthe relative neglect of his own poetry. His first book, Shadow on the Sun, was published as long ago as 1941. This wasfollowed by six books from small presses, including that of the legendaryTambimuttu in London, and two from the Menard Press, most recently a “newand selected poems,” The Next Room(1995).

Modern Israel, for reasons thateveryone knows, houses Jewish immigrants from many lands. While Claude Vigéewas and is the only significant poet writing there in French, Friend was thedoyen but only one of many fine English-language (known as Anglo-Saxon even ifthey are Lithuanian Jews from South Africa) poets in Jerusalem, includingShirley Kaufman, Dennis Silk and Gabriel Levin.

Robert Friend was born into a familyof poor Jewish immigrants in a Brownsville slum in New York shortly before theFirst World War. His mother, abandoned by her husband, often could not feed thechildren. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1934 during the greatdepression, he sought work abroad.

He spent seven years in Puerto Ricoand Panama where he worked as a payroll typist, as an inspector of fire-extinguishers (a skill which came in useful later whenferreting out weaknesses in his friends’ unpublished poems and translations),as a censor during the Second World War (a skill ditto), and principally as anEnglish teacher. The typing and the deep knowledge and love of English andAmerican literature also came in more than useful in the years of his maturity,when the poems and poetry translations began to flower.

Friend settled in Israel in 1950 andtaught English and American literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalemfor more than 30 years. He was an authority on the work of E.M. Forster, thoughhis thesis on Forster was never published. But his heart and mind were plantedin poetry, in particular the poets whose formal skills in traditional metre andrhyme had such an influence on him. Frost and Auden were his masters.

He was a very generous, affectionateand supportive friend, though he had a stubborn, even mildly authoritarian streak,and could be very touchy. But not only his friends and lovers and Aunt Yettaloved him. Cats did too, as the many foreign and local visitors to his basementflat on Jabotinsky Street (which had once housed a Naafi canteen and MartinBuber’s library) could not fail to realise. Children too: I remember him inLondon, entertaining my own children when they were young, with stories andgames and gestures. He was a born educator, a natural teacher.

Essentially a cultural Zionist in thetradition of Ahad Ha’am, he had no time at all for the territorialists andfundamentalists on the Right whose obsessions threaten to undo the work ofRabin and Peres, work which was made possible by the earlier arguments andcommitment of the liberal left – to which he belonged. He put his ideals intopractice by loving men across the border line. FewIsraelis, even Sabras, had his understanding of the Palestinians.

The best comment on his poetry was bythe friend who saw him as a father and his poetry as “the mother ground Istarted from” – the distinguished and far better-known New York poetEdward Field: “In Robert Friend’s work I respond to a teaching that is beyondthe individual poem but is implicit in all of it as a devotion, not just tocraft, but to self-examination. His refusal to trust easily – feelings,language, or ideas – is almost religious, and is the basis of the humour inmany of his poems. Since there is no question of denying the erotic, the poemscelebrate it, all the while exploring the bitter, exacting price. But thepoetics are so playful and musical that we are charmed fromany possible dismay, to recognise that these poems are truly about ourselves.”