Lea Goldberg: Selected Poems & Drama

Recipient of a PEN Translation Grant

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Lea Goldberg was one of Israel's most beloved authors. Best known as a poet, she was the author of children's books, plays and essays. She was also a theater critic, editor, translator and founder of Hebrew University's Department of Comparative Literature. Selected Poetry and Drama is a collection of Goldberg's best-known poems, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back and Goldberg's only play, The Lady of the Castle, by T. Carmi.

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“Lea Goldberg was born in Prussia and immigrated to Palestine in 1935 where she was a successful award-winning poet, a beloved children's author, dramatist, theater critic, translator and editor.... This collection features poetry from her main works, as well as her play Lady of the Castle. Her poetry is concise, simple, and clear, and, as translator Rachel Tzvia Back explains in the introduction, is '…searingly honest, intimate and bare. Her poems are of desire and unrequited love, of longing for landscapes—geographic and temporal—that are lost forever, of an immigrant's divided identity and sense of dislocation, of nature that is often unforgiving but always wonderous….'” 

—Tova Stabin