Meir Wieseltier

Meir Wieseltier (b. 1941, Moscow, Russia) came to Israel as a child after spending two years in Poland, Germany and France. He grew up in Netanya and now lives in Tel Aviv. He studied at the Hebrew University.
In the early 1960s he was the central figure in a group of artists known as "the Tel Aviv poets." Wieseltier is a poet, and was co-founder and co-editor of several issues of the literary magazine Siman Kriah. He is the poetry editor at Am Oved Publishing House. Wieseltier has translated English, French and Russian poetry into Hebrew, as well as four of Shakespeare`s tragedies, and novels by Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and E.M. Forster.He received the 2000 Israel Prize for Literature.
Wieseltier has consistently taken a nonconformist literary stance. His passion for Tel Aviv plays an important role in his writing and expresses itself in a love-hate relationship. Employing often-ironic imagery and a sarcastic, despairing tone, he demands complete awareness of life`s unavoidably painful realities, and urges full emotional and philosophical involvement. Wieseltier places himself at the heart of his work, often writing in the first person, and takes on the role of moralist, searching for values in the midst of chaos. For Wieseltier, poetry is both oppressive ("a lust for lies") and life-giving: inherently futile, it is, nonetheless, the alternative to surrender and mediocrity.

Books Published in Hebrew

Poetry

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Achshav, 1967 [Perek Alef, Perek Beit]

100 Poems, Gog, 1969 [Meah Shirim]

Take It, Siman Kriah, 1973 [Kah]

Something Optimistic, The Making of a Poem, Siman Kriah, 1976 [Davar Optimi, Asiat Shirim]

Interior and Exterior, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1977 [Pnim Va-Hutz]

Exit into the Sea, Siman Kriah, 1981 [Motzah El Ha-Yam]

The Concise Sixties, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1984 [Kitzur Shnot Ha-Shishim]

Greek Island, Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman Kriah, 1985 [Ee Yevani]

Letters, Am Oved, 1986 [Michtavim Ve-Shirim Aherim]

Storehouse, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994 [Mahsan]

Merudim and Sonnets, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2009 [merudim ve- sonatut]

Books in Translation

Selected Poems
English: Berkeley, The University of California Press, 2003
Italian: Genova, San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2003

Individual poems have been published in: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian.

Last update:02.07.09