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The name Ḥ ayyim Lenski may be unfamiliar to most English readers. Lenski is not as famous as other great Hebrew poets of his generation, nor has his work ever enjoyed true international repute. Only few English translations of his poems exist. Yet, there is no doubt that Lenski was among the interwar period's greatest talent. His lyrical corpus amounts to approximately 200 compositions, including poems, ballads, sonnets, and translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Lermontov, and Aleksandr Pushkin. He even translated (from Russian) an adaptation of the Jangal-maa, a popular epic of the Mansi people -an indigenous popula tion of Western Siberia -which he rendered in Hebrew with the name Sefer ha-Tundra (The Tundra Book). Lenski conceived his Hebrew works in almost complete isolation, due to the tragic circumstances of his life and the fact that, by the mid-1920s, when he began to compose the main core of his oeuvre, the center of Hebrew poetry had already moved from Russia and Central Europe to Palestine.

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