The American-born Robert Friend, who died in Jerusalem
in 1998, was a distinguished poet and translator. Friend’s skill as a poet, combined with his facility for languages, allowed him to excel at the exceedingly difficult task of translating poetry. He translated some eight hundred works first written in Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, but is best known for his translations of Hebrew poetry.
The present volume contains Friend’s versions of twenty Hebrew poets: Haim Nachman Bialik, Yaakov Fichman, Yaakov Steinberg, Rachel, David Vogel, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Esther Raab, Yocheved Bat-Miriam,
Hayim Lenski, Natan Alterman, Leah Goldberg, Gabriel Preil, Zelda, Yehuda Amichai, Dan Pagis, Natan Zach, David Avidan, Dalia Ravikovitch, Dalia Herz and Zali Gurevitch.
Robert Friend’s close friend, the poet and translator Gabriel Levin, has edited the late poet’s uncollected translations into a collection Friend himself could not have bettered. Not only reflecting Friend’s taste and skills, the collection has a kind of serendipitous coherence as a representative anthology of twentieth century Hebrew poetry. Robert Friend’s proposed title reflects Goethe’s inspired riposte (as Borges might have suggested) to Robert Frost: far from being ‘what gets lost in translation’ the poetry is ‘what survives translation’.
Toby Press is pleased to release this classic as a new bilingual edition, the original Hebrew poems
appearing next to Friend’s superlative translations.
 | Robert Friend |
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The Critics Praise:
"The selection of Friend’s best work amounts to an anthology of the best of Hebrew poetry
written in the last hundred years." Modern Poetry in Translation
"The language is simple. The images are often startlingly beautiful. The miracle is that these
poems feel like poems originally written in English." Poetry Book Society Bulletin
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