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Dory Manor 

Author  ▪  Translator  ▪  Editor

Dory Manor on Wikipedia

The author, translator and editor Dory Manor was born in Tel Aviv, Israel.​ He is the founder and editor of The 21st publishing house and of the literary magazine Oh!. (since 2005). From 1996 to 2006 he resided in Paris, teaching Hebrew literature and translation at the INALCO University and at the Institut National de Sciences Politiques. In Israel he teaches Poetry, editing and translation at the Tel Aviv University and the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He edited many works by Israeli prize-winning poets and writers.

Dory Manor pic.jpeg

Manor's works were published in several literary magazines in English, French and Russian (including The Columbia Review, World Literature Today, Granta and Apulée). He was awarded the title of Honorary Fellow in Writing by the University of Iowa participated in the International Writing Program in Iowa, USA.

In 2007 Manor received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Writers, and in 2008 he was awarded the Tchernichovsky Prize for best translations of world masterpieces. In 2011 he received the Ministry of Culture biannual prize for the best literary editor. In 2015 he received the prestigious Yehuda Amichai prize for his poetry.

In 2017 he got his PhD in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature from INALCO University of Paris.

Photo: Shai Levy

Bio
Work

Work

Manor has published four collections of poetry:  Minority (2001), Alpha and Omega, a libretto co-authored with Anna Herman for an opera based on a series of lithographs by Edvard Munch (2001) and Baritone (2005). In 2012 he published volume of his collected poetic works, The Center of the Flesh, edited by Prof. Dan Miron in a collaborative project of Mosad Bialik and Hakibbutz Hameuchad.

 

In 2015 Manor co-edited (with Ronen Sonis) Niflaata, the first Hebrew language anthology of LGBT poetry, including texts going from ancient Greek and Sumerian poetry to contemporary Israeli verse.  

 

Manor edited and with singer-songwriter Rona Kenan and authors Shlomtzion Kenan and Alona Kimhi, co-hosted a musical and literary radio program on the national network.

 

His Hebrew translations of poetry include masterpieces by Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Verlaine, William Blake, WH Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Federico Garcia Lorca and many others. He has also translated prose works such as René Descartes’ Méditations Métaphysiques, Flaubert’s Letters to Louise Colet, Voltaire’s Candide and Molière's L'Avare.

Colletcted Poems

Oh! Literary Magazine

Nifla'ata - LGBT anthology

Selected Reviews

Dory Manor is the most important poet of his generation. An extraordinarily gifted poet and translator, his work combines linguistic and rhythmic virtuosity with a highly complex emotional depth and a striking expressiveness.

Chana Kronfeld, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley

Dory Manor's poetry is virtually perfect. His poetic creations make one think of those statuettes, which, although of a reduced size, have the effect of huge statues majestically installed in certain public squares. Their rhetorical strength, their powerful music, their density and their psychological and philosophical depth endow them with an extraordinarily ample gesture.

Dan Miron, Professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recipient of the Israel Prize for Literature

"And all the rest is Hebrew" - this is a good way to define the poetic art of Dory Manor, a virtuoso who has very few equals in the history of Hebrew poetry. And to find one I would not go looking for Nathan Alterman, whose poetry - and the type of virtuosity - have very little in common with Manor, but rather for the Hebrew poets of the Italian Renaissance."

Yoram Bronovski, Haaretz

Dory Manor's collection of poems is a key moment and, so to speak, a watershed in the trajectory of Hebrew poetry, thanks of the poet's daring to rethink poetry from its very beginning, to redefine it and to return (...) to its foundations: prosody, rhyme, technique, perfection of form.

Benny Ziffer, Editor in Chief, Haaretz Literary Supplement

Selected Reviews

 Selected poems by Dory Manor

Translated from the Hebrew by Ronen Sonis 

Poems

Unraveling

 

Can a man sing to himself a lonely lullaby?

Can a man believe that he is truly all alone?

His childhood is unraveled, he's a thread now by his own,

And there's no force in nature that can make him shut an eye.

 

A man is travelling in his mind to Vilnius or Spain,

He drifts away, west of himself and north of times gone by.

He builds himself a gondola and sails from vein to vein,

But there's no force in nature that can make him shut an eye.

 

And drawing his warm blanket on, he feels that by his bed

His mother would be kneeling now and lowering her head.

He tries to sing himself to sleep and hears the lullaby,

But there's no force in nature that can make him shut an eye.

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