Arie Ludwig Strauss: “A Psalm Returns Home”
Abstract
This is an attempt to describe the bi-lingual poet Arie Ludwig Strauss’s journey from his poetry in German to his Hebrew poetry. Steeped as he was in the German poetic tradition, from Old Germanic Stabreim to Hölderlin and particularly Stefan George, and preoccupied with the phonetic, musical aspects of verse, Strauss was determined, on discovering his Hebrew heritage, to apply George’s sound devices to the Hebrew poems he began writing after his immigration to Palestine. This paper focuses on Strauss’s struggle to find a Hebrew parallel to the music of his German verse. It argues that the tonality of his Hebrew poetry is a product of two traditions: a phonological orchestration of syllables, derived largely from George, and wordplay involving whole words rather than only syllables, derived from biblical Hebrew and the Hebrew of medieval Judeo-Spanish poetry.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Horkheimer und Adorno über „jüdische Psychologie“. Ein vergessenes Theorieprogramm der 1940er Jahre
- The World of Yesterday versus The Turning Point: Art and the Politics of Recollection in the Autobiographical Narratives of Stefan Zweig and Klaus Mann
- Rückkehr in den Elfenbeinturm: Deutsch an der Hebräischen Universität
- Introduction: Arie Ludwig Strauss Between Hölderlin and Yehuda Halevi
- Arie Ludwig Strauss: “A Psalm Returns Home”
- A Blessed Journey: The Imprint of Yehuda Halevi’s Poetry on Ludwig Strauss’s Land Israel Poems
- Hölderlin in Jerusalem: Buber and Strauss on Poetry and the Limits of Dialogue
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Horkheimer und Adorno über „jüdische Psychologie“. Ein vergessenes Theorieprogramm der 1940er Jahre
- The World of Yesterday versus The Turning Point: Art and the Politics of Recollection in the Autobiographical Narratives of Stefan Zweig and Klaus Mann
- Rückkehr in den Elfenbeinturm: Deutsch an der Hebräischen Universität
- Introduction: Arie Ludwig Strauss Between Hölderlin and Yehuda Halevi
- Arie Ludwig Strauss: “A Psalm Returns Home”
- A Blessed Journey: The Imprint of Yehuda Halevi’s Poetry on Ludwig Strauss’s Land Israel Poems
- Hölderlin in Jerusalem: Buber and Strauss on Poetry and the Limits of Dialogue
