Translations by Robert Friend
Edited and introduced by Gabriel Levin

The American-born Robert Friend, who died in Jerusalem in 1998, was a distinguished poet and translator from Hebrew. His selected poems, 'The Next Room', was published by Menard in 1995. The present volume contains Friend's renderings of twenty Hebrew poets including such prominent figures as H N Bialik, David Vogel, Leah Goldberg and Yehuda Amichai.

Friend's close colleague, the post and translator Gabriel Levin, has edited the late poet's uncollected translations into a collection as Friend himself would have wished. Reflecting Friend's personal tastes and skills, it has a serendipitous coherence as a representative anthology of twentieth century Hebrew poetry. The title reflests Goethe's inspired riposte to Robert Frost: far from being 'what gets lost in translation', the poetry is 'what survives translation'.