The Library of Congress > Linked Data Service > LC Name Authority File (LCNAF)

Friend, Robert, 1913-1998


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    • found: Preil, G. Sunset possibilities and other poems, 1984:CIP t.p. (Robert Friend)
    • found: Agnon, Shmuel Yosef. Agnon's Alef bet, ©1998:title page (Robert Friend)
    • found: The drunken boat website, viewed June 29, 2017"Obituary: Robert Friend" [by Anthony Rudolf] (Robert Friend, poet and translator: born New York 25 November 1913; died Jerusalem 12 January 1998. Robert Friend was an outstanding translator of modern Hebrew poets. His active Hebrew was serviceable but not brilliant, but his passive Hebrew was good enough to work in tandem with brilliant Hebrew scholars like Shimon Sandbank on translations of books by Leah Goldberg, Ra'hel, Natan Alterman, Gabriel Preil and S. J. Agnon. There were many translations of other poets published in periodicals, and from Yiddish and other languages as well as Hebrew. It is notable that this proud gay poet's major work as a translator was of women. Love poets, and often unhappy (to put it mildly), they spoke to the very depths of Robert Friend. Like many distinguished poetry translators in a golden age of translation, Friend endured the relative neglect of his own poetry. His first book, Shadow on the Sun, was published as long ago as 1941. This was followed by six books from small presses, including The Next Room (1995). Robert Friend was born into a family of poor Jewish immigrants in a Brownsville slum in New York shortly before the First World War. His mother, abandoned by her husband, often could not feed the children. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1934 during the great depression, he sought work abroad. He spent seven years in Puerto Rico and Panama where he worked as a payroll typist, as an inspector of fire-extinguishers, and as a censor during the Second World War, a skill which came in useful later when ferreting out weaknesses in his friends' unpublished poems and translations, and principally as an English teacher. The typing and the deep knowledge and love of English and American 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 and taught English and American literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for more than 30 years. He was an authority on the work of E.M. Forster, though his thesis on Forster was never published. But his heart and mind were planted in poetry, in particular the poets whose formal skills in traditional metre and rhyme had such an influence on him. Frost and Auden were his masters. He was a born educator and a natural teacher.) - http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/anthonyrudolf.html
    • found: Wikipedia website, viewed June 29, 2017Robert Friend (Friend was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. He was the eldest of five children. 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. He settled in Israel in 1950, where he lived the rest of his life. He taught English and American Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for over thirty years. He was well known in Israel as an English-language poet and a translator of Hebrew poetry. Robert Friend was gay, and his sexuality found expression in his poetry well before the Stonewall era.) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Friend
    • found: LC data base, 7/19/84(hdg.: Friend, Robert)

  • LC Classification

    • PR9510.9.F75

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  • Change Notes

    • 1984-07-23: new
    • 2017-07-14: revised

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