Leah Goldberg

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Leah Goldberg (May 29, 1911- January 15, 1970) was a Hebrew poet and student of literature who is considered one of Israel's classic poets. Born in Königsberg^[1], Goldberg studied in Lithuania and Germany, specializing in philosophy and Semitic languages. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in 1933, before coming to Mandatory Palestine in 1935.

In Israel, Goldberg worked first as a literary adviser to Habimah, the national theater, and as editor of Sifriyat Poalim ("Workmen's Library") books. In 1954, she became a lecturer in literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1963 on, she headed the university's Department of Comparative Literature.

Goldberg translated numerous foreign works faithfully into Hebrew, employing her excellent knowledge of seven languages. Her Hebrew translations include, in particular, works of modernist Russian poets and translations from Italian.

Goldberg had a modernist literary style that may superficially look uncomplicated. She writes in a poem about her own style that "lucid and transparent / are my images". Although she sometimes chose to write poems that do not rhyme (especially in her later period), she always respected questions of rhythm; moreover, in her "antique" works (e.g. the set of love poems "The Sonnets of Theresa di Mon", a false document about the love-longings of a married French noblewoman to a young tutor), Goldberg adopted complex rhyming schemes. A very elaborate style that she sometimes used was the 13-line sonnet.

Goldberg's poems often speak about loneliness and broken relationships, of which she speaks with a tragic intonation, originating as some may say in her own loneliness. Some of her subjects are deeply rooted in the Western culture (for instance, the Odyssey) and the Jewish culture. She also writes about nature, with a longing that produced perhaps some of her best-known and loved poems. Many mistake some of her best-known poems -- the Songs of the land of my love -- for poems about the Land of Israel. The first stanza of one of these poems is presented below, and suggests that the country in question, considering the described precipitation, is not Israel, but perhaps the poet's native land:

My homeland, a poor and fair land

The Queen has no home, the King has no crown

And there are seven days of spring-time a year

All the rest are rain and chill.

[edit] Footnotes

^ Leah Goldberg listed two contradictory birth places: in a 1956 biographical manuscript she wrote that she was born in Königsberg, but when filling out a form for the Israeli authors' association in 1964 she listed her birth place as Kaunas. The accepted birth place is Königsberg.