These dialogues between Robert Aitken Roshi, one of the first American-born Zen masters, and Brother David Steindl-Rast, the Roman Catholic monk and hermit, took place during a week-long retreat the two old friends undertook in 1991 in a remote part of the island of Hawaii. Their aim was to approach the dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity in a fresh way, one that takes as its starting point a comparison of the personal experiences of the dialoguers—as a Buddhist and as a Christian, respectively—rather than abstract concepts. The result is the discovery of a surprising amount of common ground—the kind of shared experience that forms a solid foundation for further dialogue.

This beautifully crafted book is a collaboration between a scholar of both classical Arabic and Hebrew and a poet who has also previously translated several volumes of Hebrew poetry. The result is an authoritative translation that allows the poetry to sing in English as it does in Hebrew. The book begins with an accessible introduction that establishes the context and date of the poem as well as the history of its incorporation into the canon of Hebrew Scripture and its translation and interpretation in Jewish and Christian traditions. The translation and the Hebrew text are printed on facing pages, followed by Robert Alter's Afterword and an extensive commentary accessible to laypersons as well as scholars, to readers who know Hebrew as well as those who don't. Whether the Song of Songs qualifies as the world's first great love poem is a matter for debate—Sappho's poetry predates its canonical form by several centuries—but, even where its priority is in question, this new translation leaves little room for doubt as to its greatness and its passion.