Natan Zach was born in 1930 in Berlin to a German father and an Italian mother; he immigrated to Haifa as a child. At the vanguard of a group of poets who began to publish after Israel’s establishment, Zach has had a great influence on the development of modern Hebrew poetry as editor and critic, as well as translator and poet. Zach has been one of the most important innovators in Hebrew poetry since the 1950s and he is well known in Israel also for his outstanding translations of the poetry of Else Lasker-Schüler and Allen Ginsberg.