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| Yoel Hoffmann | |
Israeli author, editor, scholar, and translator Yoel Hoffmann died August 25. He was 86. New Directions, one of his U.S. publishers, shared the news of his passing "with great sadness," adding: "We loved Yoel and are honored to have published seven of his books. We are deeply saddened by this loss to literature and to everyone who knew Yoel Hoffmann. We take comfort in his glorious and beautiful work."
Hoffmann was born in Brasov, Romania. While he was still a baby, his parents fled Europe, escaping the Nazis and reaching what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His mother died soon after and his father placed him as an infant in an orphanage for some years. As a young man, he traveled to Japan, living for two years in a Zen monastery and studying with the monks. Hoffmann became one of the leading Western scholars of Zen Buddhism and of Japanese poetry (Japanese Death Poems and The Sound of One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers are among his works), which he taught for many years at the University of Haifa.
His other books include Katschen & the Book of Joseph; Moods; Curriculum Vitae; The Heart Is Katmandu; The Christ of Fish; Bernhard; and The Shunra and the Schmetterling. Hoffmann was awarded the inaugural Koret Jewish Book Award, the Bialik Prize, and the Prime Minister's Prize.
"We want to take this moment to celebrate Yoel's extraordinary writing and to mourn our friend with a few words from his translator Peter Cole," New Directions noted.
Cole wrote: "Word wafted in from Bangkok, from New York, from Tel Aviv: the sprite-like diviner of Hebrew had passed on, into the space between the lines of his matchless prose. Reading Yoel for the first time--and each time after that was a first time again--lifted me into a cloud of unknowing. His language struck me as a curious, off-kilter music, rendered, it seemed, from a complex alloy of distant and familiar tongues, or qualities of consciousness. In person, his wit and syncopated gentleness muted a deep-seated and somehow tectonic agitation, as if he were a loudspeaker Beuys had encased in felt. On the page, he seemed at once timeless and utterly of his moment, absolute in his whimsy and also sublime. His work created in me precisely the sort of attention required to enter it, which is maybe why I found it so magical. As reader and writer, translator and poet, I've loved riding his Moebius movement of mind and often sensed that, in some quintessentially Yoelian way, it was leading me toward the dark, original spark of the translation from which he himself had emerged."
From Curriculum Vitae, translated by Peter Cole: "The beauty of death and the violet colors accompanying it. Announcements that make nothing dawn on one, and the dawn itself rising from nowhere like a birthday present 365 days a year."