Chana Bloch, poet and renowned Hebrew translator, died in her home in Berkeley, California after a four-year battle with sarcoma on May 19, The New York Times reports. She was 77.

Bloch’s relationship to poetry was defined by a focus, as William Grimes describes in his obituary for Times, on “taut, pared-down verse that fused disarming simplicity with emotional depth.”

“I value clarity—an old-fashioned virtue—and concision,” she told The San Francisco Book Review in 2011. “I like poetry that appears to be clear on the surface, with unexpected depths.”

Over her lifetime, Chana wrote six poetry collections—her sixth, The Moon Is Almost Full, will be published by Autumn House Press this September. She translated from Hebrew, including three books by Dahlia Ravikovitch: Hovering at a Low Altitude with colleague Chana Kronfeld (2009), The Window: New and Selected Poems (1989) with her first husband, Ariel Bloch, and A Dress of Fire (1978); two books by Yehuda Amichai: Open Closed Open with Chana Kronfeld (2000) and The Selected Poetry with Stephen Mitchell (1996); and a book of the Old Testament, The Song of Songs: A New Translation, Introduction and Commentary, also with her first husband, Ariel Bloch, who was a scholar of Semitic linguistics (1995).

Her awards included Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the 2012 Meringoff Poetry Award, and a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Amichai’s Open Closed Open.

Chana was born Florence Ina Faerstein on March 15, 1940 in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from what is now the Ukraine. She earned two master’s degrees from Brandeis University, in Near Eastern and Judaic studies and English literature, and a PhD in English from UC Berkeley. In 1973, she taught Hebrew at Mills College in Oakland, where she founded and directed the creative writing program until her retirement in 2005.

She is survived by her husband Dave Sutter; her two sons, Benjamin Bloch and Jonathan Bloch; her brother, Saul Faerstein; and two granddaughters.

Photo Credit: Margaretta K. Mitchell