  Rosenzweig’s most important intellectual and cultural contribution during the years of his illness came in his work on translation. In the fall of 1922, his writing and speech already significantly impaired, Rosenzweig began drafting a book of translations of poems written by the medieval Jewish poet and thinker, Judah HaLevi. He finished the translations, together with commentaries on each poem and an afterword outlining his views on the task of translation itself, in the first week of 1923, and the book was published as Sixty Hymns and Poems of Judah HaLevi in 1924 (an expanded edition, Ninety-two Hymns and Poems of Judah HaLevi, appeared in 1927). In May of 1925, Martin Buber invited Rosenzweig to collaborate with him on a new German translation of the Bible, and Rosenzweig devoted much of the last years of his life to this project.