Abraham Yahuda

Abraham Yahuda was a Jewish Palestinian polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents. He was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family originally from Baghdad. He studied journalism at Baghdad University and later worked as a journalist and a translator in Beirut. He emigrated to the United States in 1967 and lived in San Francisco for most of his life. He was influenced by the Beat generation and translated many American poets into Arabic, such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He also translated classical English poets, such as Shakespeare, Shelley, and Auden. He wrote his own poetry in Arabic, Assyrian, and English, and experimented with free verse and symbolism. He was considered one of the most innovative and influential Arab poets of the twentieth century. He died of cancer on October 22, 2007, in San Francisco.