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A New Translation of Yehuda Halevi

In a whole new font!

by
Marc Tracy
February 16, 2011
(Tablet Magazine)
(Tablet Magazine)

Big news from our brothers and sisters at Nextbook Press: A year after dropping Hillel Halkin’s biography of the great medieval Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, today it is making available a free (that’s F-R-E-E) original e-book of a volume of Halevi’s poetry, translated by—who else?—Hillel Halkin. Simply submit your email and receive a pdf of the chapbook to print out or read on whatever sort of PC, Mac, smartphone, dumbphone, e-reader, or even, yes, tablet device you’d prefer.

If your eye for type is impeccable, you will note that the Hebrew font in which Halevi’s words are printed has never been seen before: It is the debut of Le Bé, an original digitized typeface created by Scott-Martin Kosofsky and Matthew Carter to be sort of the Hebrew version of Garamond. If you are a typeface nerd—yes, such people exist—I strongly recommend this Tablet Magazine slideshow all about it.

Of course, if you prefer the movies, you can watch Nextbook Press editor Jonathan Rosen discuss the project below:

The Selected Poems of Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]
Letters Lost and Found [Tablet Magazine]
Related: Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.