Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) is widely considered the greatest Hebrew literary figure of his age. Born in the Ukrainian village of Radi, he was orphaned at the age of seven and sent to live with his pious grandparents. At seventeen he left for the famous Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania and then for Odessa, where he emerged as the youngest of a remarkable group of Hebrew writers and intellectuals. He and his wife, Manya, made their home in Odessa for more than twenty years but were forced to flee the newly established Soviet Union in 1921 for Germany. In 1924, he set sail for British Mandatory Palestine. He died in Vienna.

Peter Cole's most recent books include Draw Me After: Poems; That Simple?... and That Complicated: Conversations on Poetry and Translation; and Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. Among his collections of translations are The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 and The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition, as well as contemporary poetry and fiction by Aharon Shabtai, Taha Muhammad Ali, Yoel Hoffmann, Harold Schimmel, and others. Cole has received numerous honors for his work, among them an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the PEN Translation Prize, fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, a National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, and a MacArthur Fellowship.