Dory Manor

Between 2010 and 2015, Manor (with Shlomzion Kenan, and later with Rona Kenan) broadcast a weekly late-night radio program on the Israeli Galey Tzahal radio channel, called Tsipporey Layla Mitpaytot, a variant of the longstanding program Tsipporey Layla. The program featured songs, poems, and short passages around a theme, and was edited by Manor and his co-broadcasters.

Between 2006 and 2012, Manor served as editor-in-chief of the book publishing department of Sal Tarbut Artsi, an Israeli state-funded art support program. Of his work as the person selecting titles for publication by the department, and working with the authors, he remarked in an interview:

In 2001, following the publication of Manor's first two books – Minority and Alpha and Omega – Benny Ziffer, longtime editor of the literary supplement of Ha'aretz, who had previously published Manor's early translations of Baudelaire, sparked a lively debate on poetic form when he wrote a glowing review of the two books, noting that "forty years after [the music of poetry] was trampled by an avantgarde aspiring to plain speech", Manor's poetry is "a watershed moment for Hebrew poetry" and praising the "welcome nerve to go back to basics in poetry, as though [Hebrew free verse poets] Amichai, Wollach, and Wieseltier never existed".

In prose, Manor translated Jean Echenoz's novel Je m'en vais (2001), Jules Verne's Le docteur Ox (2004), Voltaire's Candide (2006), Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse (2009), and Molière's play l'Avare.

Manor has published five volumes of original poetry so far. The first, titled Minority (Hebrew: מיעוט), published in 2000, contains original poetry as well as several classic French poems in translation. It was shortly followed, in 2001, by the standalone publication of a libretto Manor co-wrote with poet Anna Herman for an opera named Alpha and Omega (music by Gil Shohat), based on a series of lithographs by Edvard Munch. In 2005, Manor published another volume of original Hebrew poetry and translations from the French, titled Baritone (Hebrew: באריטון). In 2012, a comprehensive collection of Manor's poetic work was published under the title The Center of the Flesh (Hebrew: אמצע הבשר), edited and with a scholarly essay by Hebrew literature professor Dan Miron. As of 2020, Manor's latest book of original poetry is 2019's One Soul Away (Hebrew: נפש אחת אחריך).

Earlier on, Manor translated several non-fiction books, including Flaubert's Letters to Louise Colet (1999), Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (2001), Baudelaire's Les Paradis Artificiels (2003), and Raymond Aron's La Tragédie algérienne (2005).

Even before publishing his own original poetry, Manor began submitting translations into Hebrew of 19th-century French poetry to the literary supplement of Ha'aretz, beginning with poems by Baudelaire. These translations were very well received, and led to Manor's publishing several volumes of translations between 1997 and 2017.

Manor mainly translates verse, and publishes verse translations regularly in literary supplements (primarily Ha'aretz) and in the literary journal he is founding editor of, Ho!. As separate books, Manor published two volumes of poetry by Baudelaire – a selection from Les Fleurs du Mal (1997), Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose (1997); a collection of Paul Valéry's poetry named le Cimetière marin (2011); a collection of poems by Mallarmé named le tonnerre muet (2012) – all from French. In 2017, Manor published a volume of selected poems by Greek poet Cavafy, which he jointly translated with Israela Azulay, naming it Remember, Body.

In 1995 he moved to Paris to study French and literature at the Paris Diderot University. He completed a Diplôme d'Études Supérieur Appliqué degree in the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis in 2000, and a doctorate with honors from the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) in 2017. His doctoral dissertation topic was "Baudelaire in Hebrew (1890-present): his reception, influence, and translations". During his time at INALCO, Manor also taught Hebrew literature.

In 1993, Manor founded, with fellow young poets Ori Pekelman and Gal Kober, a literary journal named Ev (Hebrew: אֵב; a literary Hebrew word meaning a young plant's shoot), where they published original and translated poetry, as well as literary essays. The journal featured a distinct poetics favoring highly musical verse, and published mostly younger authors, including Shimon Adaf, Anna Herman, Eli Bar-Yahalom, Benny Mer, and Ayana Erdal. Three issues were published between 1993 and 1996, and the journal was discontinued when Pekelman and Manor moved to Paris to attend university. Despite its short life, its poetics were influential on a generation of poets. Literary scholar and critic Nissim Calderon credits Manor and Ev with directing his attention to musicality as the primary dimension of the changes of poetics in Hebrew poetry in the latter half of the 20th century.

Dory Manor (born 11 September 1971, Tel Aviv, Israel) is an Israeli poet, translator, literary editor, essayist, and educator, writing in Hebrew. His work has garnered several prizes and honors, including the Tchernichovski Prize for Translation (2008) and the French Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2018). As of 2020, Manor published five books of poetry, dozens of literary translations – especially from French (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, Rimbaud, Hugo) – and is the founding editor of the Hebrew literary journal Ho! (since 2005). He also edits books of poetry by other Hebrew poets.

This unusually warm reception by the editor of a prestigious Hebrew literary periodical led to a number of responses, and started a public controversy, mostly published in later issues of the same literary supplement of Ha'aretz. The most influential dissent was by veteran Hebrew poet Nathan Zach, whose poetic "rebellion" against the then-regnant poetics of Nathan Alterman in the mid-1950s was so impactful it led to a wide rejection of meter and rhyme in almost all Hebrew poetry written after Zach's early books. In the article Zach submitted to Ziffer as a response to Ziffer's praise, he rejected Manor's poetics as "regressive", "epigonic" (e.g. of Manor's admired Baudelaire), as well as mocked Manor's poetic exaggeration, in the titular poem "Minority": "O, country all of whose poets are straight!". Zach did acknowledge that his own epigones have often failed to apply "a sufficiently-musical ear", as free verse requires "even more than the tam-tam trance of metered verse", but asserted that "the solution cannot be to return to Alterman and Baudelaire".