Product Description

More than 60 years after his death, Chaim Nachman Bialik is inevitably called the finest and most influential modern Hebrew poet. Hailed as the poet laureate of Jewish nationalism, he was seen as the poet of hope and revival in an age that witnessed the Russian Pale of Settlement, pogroms, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of Zionism. Bialik's legacy is poetry that inspires, astonishes, and delights, and David Aberbach, the distinguished Hebrew scholar, has produced translations of a high order to stand beside the author's original Hebrew.

Edited and translated by David Aberbach.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1377169 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

About the Author
Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934) was a scholar, author, teacher, businessman, and public figure. His home in Tel Aviv is now the Bialik Museum.

David Aberbach is associate professor of Hebrew literature at McGill University, in Montreal, and has taught at universities in England and the United States.

Customer Reviews

An outstanding edition
Sheila Jelen writing in JBooks points out some of the special qualities of this translation.
" David Aberbach presents several of Bialik's classic epic and lyrical poems, as well as a surprising amount of his lesser-known folk poems in a beautiful bilingual edition. The strength of the collection resides in Aberbach's introduction and his commentary on the poems-both of which give a wonderful overview of Bialik's career and his poetic work in the context of Russian-Jewish history. Aberbach's facility, as a scholar of Modern Hebrew letters, is evident in his concise timeline of Bialik's career, as well as in his readable glosses on Bialik's choice of particular forms and particular themes in individual works and in his corpus as a whole."
Aberbach's translations read well, but there is no substitute for the the special beauty of the Hebrew. This excellent bilingual edition gives those who know something of both languages the opportunity to test and compare the original with this fine translation.