On the Surface of Silence offers for the first time in English the final
poems of Lea Goldberg, 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 a 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 and 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 20th century - poems which
will enrich, reflect, and stir the reader's heart.
