On the Surface of Silence ─ The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg

On the Surface of Silence offers for the first time in English the final poems of Lea Goldberg, the pre-eminent and central poet of modern Hebrew poetry. These extraordinary texts, composed in the last years and even last days of the poet's life and published posthumously after her untimely death, exhibit a level of lyrical distillation and formal boldness that mark them as distinctive in the poet's oeuvre. Often employing fragment-like structure, where the unspoken is as present and forceful as the spoken, stripped of adornments and engaging the reader with an uncompromising, even disarming, directness, Goldberg's last poems enact and manifest a poetics of intrepid truth-telling. The play between revelation and concealment, the language precision and the unflinching end-of-life gaze transform these texts into powerfully moving, and often surprising poems. The book itself, in the original format as masterfully edited by Tuvia Ruebner with drawings by Goldberg herself interspersed among the poems, is a significant and beautiful artifact of modern Hebrew culture.

This bilingual edition, with translations by award winning translator Rachel Tzvia Back, brings us poems from a singular poetic voice of the twentieth century—poems that will enrich, reflect, and stir the reader's heart.

Lea Goldberg (1911-1970) was the recipient of the Israel Prize for poetry, the state’s highest honor. Goldberg was a playwright, author of children’s books, and translator.
Rachel Tzvia Back is a poet, translator, and professor of literature at Oranim College in Israel