Emma Lazarus是出生于纽约的美国犹太诗人。最著名的代表作品是十四行诗“The New Colossus”。

Background

Literary career

Emma Lazarus(July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American poet born in New York City.

She is best known for "The New Colossus", a sonnet written in 1883; its final lines were engraved on

a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1912. The sonnet was solicited by

William Maxwell Evarts as a donation to an auction, conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition

in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" to raise funds to build the pedestal

Background

Lazarus was the fourth of seven children of Moshe Lazarus and Esther Nathan, Portuguese Sephardic Jewswhose families had been settled in New York since the colonial period. She was related through her mother to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court.

From an early age, she studied American and European literature, as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian. Her writings attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He corresponded with her up until his death.

Lazarus is buried in Beth-Olom Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Literary career

She wrote her own poems and edited many adaptations of German poems, notably those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine. She also wrote a novel and two plays.

Lazarus began to be more interested in her Jewish ancestry after reading the George Eliot novel, Daniel Deronda, and as she heard of the Russian pogroms in the early 1880s. This led Lazarus to write articles on the subject. She also began translating the works of Jewish poets into English. Expelled in great numbers from the Russian Pale of Settlement, eastern European Ashkenazi Jews immigrated in destitute multitudes to New York in the winter of 1882. Lazarus taught technical education to help them become self-supporting.

She traveled twice to Europe, first in May 1885 after the death of her father in March and again in September 1887. She returned to New York City seriously ill after her second trip and died two months later on 19 November 1887, most likely from Hodgkin's disease.

She is known as an important forerunner of the Zionist movement. She argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Herzl began to use the term Zionism.

Emma Lazarus 于 1849 年出生于纽约一个犹太人家庭. 她有六个兄弟姊妹, 她是老四. 她从小爱好写作, 小小年纪, 就写了好些诗歌剧本什么的, 还出了一本作品集. 她懂几门外语, 包括法语德语意大利语. 她的写作还受到 Ralph Waldo Emerson 的关注.

2008 年, 罗德格斯大学出版社出了一本论文集, The Traffic In Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, 里面有一篇在宾夕法尼亚大学教书的 Max Cavitch 的论文 "Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty," 很精彩. 如果有人以为 Emma Lazarus 这首诗表达了对新移民的"欢迎," 可以看看这篇论文. 网上有电子版.