Shaul Tchernichovsky
Saul Tschernichowski (Hebrew שאול טשרניחובסקי; born August 20, 1875 in Mikhailovka, Russian Empire, † October 14, 1943 in Jerusalem) was a Hebrew poet and translator.
Life
Tschernichowski grew up in a house of pious Jews, but they were open to the Haskalah and the beginning of Zionism. As a 14 - year-old he was sent to Odessa, where he first completed a commercial apprenticeship and privately prepared for university studies. Special interest he showed in language learning; later he translated works from German, French, English, Greek and Latin into Hebrew. In Odessa Tschernichowski became familiar with the modern Hebrew literature and reading, among others, the works of Chaim Nachman Bialik and Mendele Moicher Sforim.
After he was refused admission at a Russian university, Tschernichowski took in 1899 at the University of Heidelberg to study medicine and graduated in 1905 from the University of Lausanne. 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 trouble finding a job because he could not show a degree from a Russian university. In the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, he was arrested in 1907 as a " political agitator ". After his graduation was finally recognized and after further unsuccessful attempts to find 1908 in one of the villages of Lower Galilee employment as a doctor, he settled in 1910 in St. Petersburg down; during the First World War, he served as an army doctor. After the October Revolution, its economic situation worsened. After three years of miserable existence as a doctor in Odessa in 1922 he left Soviet Russia. During this time he wrote several poems and translated works from Greek ( Anacreon's poetry, Plato's Symposium, and a portion of Homer's Iliad ) as well as from English works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
After a brief stay in Constantinople Opel, where he tried unsuccessfully to get a job as a doctor in Palestine, he moved to Berlin in 1922, where he scored as a writer and scientific editor a modest income. He continued his translation activity and transferred Reineke Fuchs von Goethe, The Imaginary Invalid by Molière, Macbeth by Shakespeare, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Finnish Kalevala epic into Hebrew and finished 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 awarded the contract, the issue " book of medical and scientific terms" in Latin, English and Ivrit, so that he could settle in Eretz Israel. After completion of this work he was appointed school physician in Tel Aviv in 1936. In 1936 he signed a contract with the publishing house Schocken and moved to Jerusalem, where he lived until his death in 1943.
Tschernichowskis work, both as a poet and as a translator, is characterized by the tendency to break out of the confining boundaries of Hebrew literature and expand their content and form. His translations reflect the effort, the Hebrew reader nearly bring the whole breadth of the world literature. His concern for immediate existential expression explains the fluctuation of the poet between idyllic approach which considers man as a part of the universe, and tragic view that brings the sense of alienation of the people expressed.