Taking up Gershom Scholem's call to plumb the "tremendous poetic potential concealed" in the Kabbalistic tradition, this book provides dazzling English renderings of works composed on three continents over a period of some fifteen hundred years. It presents the texts in their original languages alongside the English translations.

Peter Cole is the author of three books of poetry and the translator of more than a dozen volumes from Hebrew and Arabic. His many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, and the PEN Translation Award for Poetry. In 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Aminadav Dykman teaches comparative literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.