Born in northern Spain sometime before 1075, Yehuda Halevi was the preeminent Hebrew poet of twelfth-century Andalusia and author of the religious treatise The Book of the Kuzari. In 1140 he set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The poems of On the Sea, braiding scriptural quotation and a more personal voice, record the poet’s perilous voyage to Alexandria, where Halevi remained for close to a year before embarking, once again, for the Syro-Palestinian coast and Jerusalem. Reports of his disappearance reached Egypt some four months later, though the date, location, and circumstances of his death remain a mystery. Introduction and notes by Gabriel Levin.

“Gabriel Levin … offers free translations which are vigorous, exciting, sparkling with ingenuity and … strangely haunting.”

Nicholas de Lange, In Other Words

“Levin demonstrates his talents as both a translator and a poet in his own right…. His extravagantly rich poetics … recall the literary excesses of Gerard Manley Hopkins …”

The Jerusalem Post

This book has been folded into Gabriel Levin’s translations of Yehuda Halevi, Poems from the Diwan, published by Anvil Press, now Carcanet.