Aharon Amir

Aharon Amir (אהרן אמיר, January 5, 1923 – February 28, 2008) was an Israeli Hebrew poet, a literary translator and a writer.

Aharon Amir was born in Kaunas, Lithuania.

He moved to Palestine with his family in 1933 and grew up in Tel Aviv.

His father,

Meir Lipec, was later director of the publishing house Am Oved.

He attended Gymnasia Herzliya high school.

At the time of the British Mandate in Palestine, while studying Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University, Amir was a member of the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds as well as a founding member of the Canaanite movement (canaanism), which saw Hebrew or Israeli culture as defined by geographical location rather than religious affiliation.

Amir was married to Bettine, a poet and painter.

He had three children from a previous marriage.

He founded and edited the literary magazine Keshet, which he closed in 1976 after eighteen years of publication to concentrate on his own writing.

In 1998, the magazine was revived as The New Keshet.

He was often known in Israel thanks to a popular song by Meir Ariel, which cited Amir's translation of Hemingway's Islands in the Stream.

He died of cancer on February 28, 2008, at the age of 85, and left his body to science.

Amir translated over 300 books into Hebrew, including English and French classics by Melville, Charles Dickens, Camus, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Emily Brontë and O. Henry.

He also translated works by Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.