Leah Goldberg - Literary Style & Influences

Literary Style & Influences

Goldberg had a modernist literary style that may superficially look uncomplicated. She writes in a poem about her own style that "lucid and transparent / are my images". Although she sometimes chose to write poems that do not rhyme (especially in her later period), she always respected questions of rhythm; moreover, in her "antique" works (e.g., the set of love poems The Sonnets of Therese du Meun, a false document about the love-longings of a married French noblewoman for a young tutor), Goldberg adopted complex rhyming schemes. A very elaborate style that she sometimes used was the thirteen-line sonnet.

Her work is deeply rooted in Western culture (for instance, the Odyssey) and Jewish culture. Some of her most well known poems are about nature and longing for the landscape of her homeland, although not necessarily Israel as many presume.

Goldberg's intimate relationship with her mother, aspects of Israel, basic objects within nature, as well as loneliness and the breakdown of relationships are common themes in her poetry, with a tragic intonation that some say originates in her own loneliness. An example of these elements are seen in her poem, "Tel Aviv 1935" (תל אביב 1935):

איך יכול האויר של העיר הקטנה
לשאת כל כך הרבה
זכרונות ילדות, אהבות שנשרו
חדרים שרוקנו אי-בזה

כתמונות משחירות בתוך מצלמה
התהפכו לילות חורף זכים
לילות קיץ גשומים שמעבר לים
ובקרים אפלים של בירות

"How did the air of that small city
find a way to bear so many
memories of childhood, lovers shed,
rooms emptied somewhere?

Like pictures blackening inside a camera,
clear winter nights were reversed,
and rainy summer nights across the sea,
and foggy mornings of capital cities."

(Trans. Annie Kantar, With This Night – University of Texas Press, 2011.)