Publisher's Synopsis
More than 60 years after his death, Chaim Nachman Bialik is inevitably called the finest and most influential modern Hebrew poet. More than 60 years after his death, Chaim Nachman Bialik is inevitably called the finest and most influential modern Hebrew poet. In his lifetime, Bialik was hailed as the poet laureate of Jewish nationalism. He was seen as the poet of hope and revival in an age which witnessed the Russian Pale of Settlement, pogroms, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Zionism and of Hebrew as a living language. David Aberbach, the distinguished Hebrew scholar, has produced translations of a high order to stand beside the author's original Hebrew. The selection includes an extract from 'In the City of Slaughter' - the poem that made Bialik famous when it appeared in 1903 as one of a series of 'poems of wrath' - as well as a number of his folk poems which have frequently been set to music. Selected Poems is a collection of Bialik's poetry in dramatic new English translations, published alongside the original Hebrew. Of twentieth century Jewish poets, Bialik is the most influential, culturally and politically...He is the only Hebrew poet who warrants comparison with the g;- who more than the Modernists, his contemporaries, represented to him (as to most of the Russian and Jewish intelligentsia of his time) the ideal of high culture and poetic genius.
