by Dalia Ravikovitch

Dalia Ravikovitch was born in 1936 in the suburb of Tel Aviv known as Ramat Gan; after the death of her father in a hit-andrun accident, she and her family went to live on a kibbutz. Ravikovitch later attended high school in Haifa and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She also served in the Israeli army, and it was during this period that her poems first appeared in newspapers and journals. In 1959 Ravikovitch published her debut collection of verse, Ahavat tapuah ha-zahav (The Love of an Orange), which established her as one of Israel’s foremost poets. Other volumes—Horef kasheh (1964; A Hard Winter), ha-Sefer ha-shelishi (1969; The Third Book), Tehum koreh (1974; Deep Calleth Unto Deep)— consolidated her reputation. In 1978 Ravikovitch’s poetry was first translated from Hebrew into English by American poet...