Saul Chernichovsky
Saul Tschernichowski ( Hebrew שאול טשרניחובסקי; Russian Саул Гутманович Чернихо́вский ; born August 20, 1875 in Michailowka , Russian Empire ; died October 14, 1943 in Jerusalem ) was a Hebrew poet and translator.
Life
Saul Tschernichowski grew up in a house of devout Jews who were open to the Haskalah and the beginning Zionism . At the age of 14 he was sent to Odessa , where he first completed a commercial training and prepared privately for university studies. He showed particular interest in learning languages; later he translated works from German, French, English, Greek and Latin into Hebrew. In Odessa, Chernichovsky became familiar with modern Hebrew literature and read the works of Chaim Nachman Bialik and Mendele Moicher Sforim , among others .
Since he was denied admission to a Russian university, Tschernichowski began studying medicine at Heidelberg University in 1899 and graduated from Lausanne University in 1905 . During this time he came under the literary influence of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche . After completing his studies in Lausanne , he returned to Russia, but had difficulty finding a job as he did not have a diploma from a Russian university. In 1907 he was arrested in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol as a "political agitator". After his degree was finally recognized and after further unsuccessful attempts in 1908 to find a job as a doctor in one of the villages of Lower Galilee , he settled in St. Petersburg in 1910 . During the First World War he served as an army doctor. After the October Revolution , its economic situation deteriorated. After three years of miserable existence as a doctor in Odessa, he left Soviet Russia in 1922 . During this time he wrote several poems and translated works from ancient Greek ( Anacreon's poetry, Plato's banquet and part of Homer's Iliad ) and from the English works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow .
After a short stay in Constantinople , where he tried unsuccessfully to get a job as a doctor in Palestine , he moved to Berlin in 1922 , where he earned a modest income as a writer and scientific editor. He continued his translation work, translating Reineke Fuchs from Goethe, The Imaginary Sick from Molière, Macbeth from Shakespeare, King Oedipus from Sophocles, the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic and the Finnish Kalevala epic into Hebrew and completed the translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey . During this time he also wrote children's poems and a treatise on Immanuel ha-Romi (Berlin 1925).
In 1931 he was commissioned to publish the "Book of Medical and Scientific Expressions" in Latin, English and Iwrit , so that he could settle in Erez Israel . After completing this work, he was appointed school doctor in Tel Aviv in 1936. In 1936 he signed a contract with the Schocken publishing house and moved to Jerusalem, where he lived until his death in 1943.
plant
Chernichovsky's work, both as a poet and as a translator, is shaped by the tendency to break out of the narrow boundaries of Hebrew literature and to expand its content and form. “In this way, he enriched the Hebrew language to an almost unpredictable degree and at the same time became the role model for the virtuoso translators of the next generation.” His translations reflect the endeavor to bring the entire breadth of world literature closer to the Hebrew reader . His striving for immediate existential expression explains the poet's vacillations between an idyllic way of looking at people as part of the universe and a tragic view that expresses their feeling of alienation .
Works by Saul Tschernichowski in German
- Saul Tschernichowski: Your shine took my words away. Sonnets, idyllic poems. Partly bilingual. Translated, edited and commented by Jörg Schulte, foreword by Aminadav Dykman, Edition Rugerup , Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-942955-69-0
- Saul Tschernichowski: Your shine took my words away. Autobiography, Poems, The Golden People. Translated and edited by Jörg Schulte, Edition Rugerup , Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-942955-70-6
- Saul Tschernichowski: Your shine took my words away. Commentary on volumes I and II. Prolegomena and commentary by Jörg Schulte, edited by Gundula Schiffer, Edition Rugerup , Berlin 2020,
literature
- Encyclopedia Judaica , Vol. 15, pp. 877-883.
- Pnina Navè : Tschernichovsky . In: Dies .: The New Hebrew Literature . Francke, Bern and Munich 1962, pp. 70–75.
Web links
- Literature by and about Saul Tschernichowski in the catalog of the German National Library
Footnotes
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Chernichovsky, Saul |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Tschernichowski, Saul Gutmannowitsch |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hebrew poet and translator |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 20, 1875 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mikhailovka , Russian Empire |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 14, 1943 |
| Place of death | Jerusalem |