The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492

by Peter Cole

Overview

Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies an extraordinary sensuality and intense faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time.

Peter Cole's translations reveal this remarkable poetic world to English readers in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. The Dream of the Poem traces the arc of the entire period, presenting some four hundred poems by fifty-four poets, and including a panoramic historical introduction, short biographies of each poet, and extensive notes. (The original Hebrew texts are available on the Princeton University Press Web site.) By far the most potent and comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poems ever assembled in English, Cole's anthology builds on what poet and translator Richard Howard has described as "the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years" and "an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us." The Dream of the Poem is, Howard says, "a crowning achievement."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691121956
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/02/2007
Series:	Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation Series
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Peter Cole is a poet and translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry. He has received numerous awards for his work, including prizes from the Times Literary Supplement and the Modern Language Association, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Winner of the 2004 PEN-America Translation Award, he lives in Jerusalem, where he coedits Ibis Editions. He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2007.

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The Dream of the Poem

Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492

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Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12195-6

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Introduction

'THE SPANISH MIRACLE-" three words were all it took S. D. Goitein, the great historian of medieval Mediterranean society, to sum up the phenomenon that was the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in Iberia. The emergence in the tenth century of this vibrant Hebrew literature seemed miraculous to Goitein, as it has to so many others who have come to know it well, because the poetry appeared virtually full-blown, at the far western edge of the medieval Jewish world, after more than a millennium of almost exclusively liturgical and ingrown poetic activity in the language. Suddenly, for the first time since the apocryphal Book of Ben Sira, Hebrew poets were writing with tremendous power about a wide range of subjects, including wine, war, friendship, erotic longing, wisdom, fate, grief, and both metaphysical and religious mystery. They did so in a variety of sophisticated modes, taken over for the most part from the by-then well-established tradition of Arabic verse, onto which they grafted a biblical vocabulary and a potent Hebraic mythopoetic vision. The best of that radically new secular and religious verse produced in Muslim Andalusia and Christian Spain ranks with the finest poetry of the European Middle Ages-or, for that matter, of anymedieval era. Embodying an extraordinary sensuality and an intense faith that reflected contemporary understanding of the created world and its order, this curiously alloyed poetry confronts the twenty-first-century reader with a worldview and aesthetic that in many respects defy modern oppositional notions of self and other, East and West, Arab and Christian and Jew, as it flies in the face of our received sense of what Hebrew has done and can do, and even what Jewishness means. At the same time, its densely woven brocade, deriving as it does from the charged culture of Spanish convivencia, or coexistence, can speak with startling directness to us today, when identities are increasingly compounded and borders easily crossed. For in opening their lives to the entire expanse of Greco-Arabic and Hebrew learning, the dictionally pure Jewish poets of Cordoba, Granada, and Saragossa carried out an act of profound, if paradoxical, cultural redemption. As they translated both the essence of their knowledge and the effects of Arabic poetry into an innovative Hebrew verse-and in the process risked loss of linguistic and religious self to immersion in the foreign-the Hebrew poets of Spain found, or founded, one of the most powerful languages of Jewish expression postbiblical literature has known.

A Paradise Grove

The trail of that hybrid verse leads back to the middle of the tenth century, when a young Moroccan poet with the Berber name of Dunash Ben Labrat arrived in Cordoba. Dunash had made his way to Iberia from Baghdad, where he was studying with the greatest Jewish figure of his day, Sa'adia Ben Yosef al-Fayuumi. From Sa'adia, who was the gaon, or head, of the Babylonian Jewish academy of Sura from 928 to 942, Dunash had absorbed a keen appreciation of Arabic and its notion of fasaaha (elegance, clarity, or purity), as well as its importance for the understanding of Hebrew-and especially Hebrew Scripture. Armed with that passion and the learning it led to, Dunash was importing to Spain a trunkful of new poetic strategies that would-whether he meant them to or not- soon change the face of Hebrew literature. While the process of that change remains obscure, the city of Cordoba clearly lay at its heart.

In wandering westward Dunash was trading one metropolis for another. Over the course of nearly two centuries Abbasid Baghdad had come to be considered the most spectacular city in the world. There, in a cultural vortex of extraordinary force, men of letters took in through translation the vast intellectual treasures of Greek and Persian antiquity, along with those of India (and perhaps China). Arabic literature flourished, as major poets refined their verse with a complex array of formal and thematic modes. By the mid-tenth century, Cordoba under the blue-eyed Umayyad caliph of Spanish-Basque descent, 'Abd al-Rahmaan III (r. 912-61), was in many ways a Western version of the Round City of Peace on the Tigris, and a rival in splendor to Constantinople. It too was a city of great sophistication and diversity: Jews, Muslims, and Christians contributed to its prosperity, and ethnic division between and within these communities was-for a time-held at bay. Centralized administration constructed on Abbasid, Byzantine, and Persian models was improved- with, for instance, a well-maintained and policed network of roads and regular postal service (using carrier pigeons) linking the seat of the government and the provinces. The economy thrived, as the so-called Green Revolution of Muslim Spain increased cultivation of the land. Advanced irrigation techniques brought from the east led Arab chroniclers of the day to describe the elaborate systems of canals and the thousands of water wheels that dotted the landscape. A near-alphabet of crops were imported, including apricots, artichokes, bananas, carrots, eggplants, figs, hard wheat, lemons, oranges, parsnips, peaches, pomegranates, rice, saffron, spinach, sugarcane, and watermelon-our words for which derive, in many cases, from the Arabic: naranj, ruzz, za'afraan, sukkar, sabaanakh.

Commerce boomed, and al-Andalus became known for the goods it produced. Paper, wool, silk, cotton (qutn), linen fabrics, and much more were exported-Goitein called medieval Mediterranean trade in textiles the equivalent of the twentieth-century steel industry or stock market - along with agricultural products and slaves. Imports included aromatic wood and spices from India and China; slaves from France and northern Europe; horses from North Africa and the Arabian peninsula; marble from Greece, Syria, Italy, and the Maghreb; singing girls and volumes of songs from Iraq; books and manuscripts from Cairo and Alexandria; and carpets from Persia. Power was maintained by an enormous army and fleet (the latter, it's said, the largest in the world at its time)-manned by a mix of Arabs, Berbers, Christians, and foreign mercenaries or purchased Slavs-and the kingdom was gradually enlarged. Arms factories near Cordoba reportedly produced some one thousand bows and twenty thousand arrows a month, and fortresses sprang up across the landscape as revenues from the new conquests filled the treasury. Above all, Andalusian culture flourished, having come a long way from the pioneer coarseness of the soldiers who had settled the peninsula in the early eighth century, when Taariq Ibn Ziyaad crossed the straits and landed at the rock he called Jabal al-Taariq (Taariq's mountain), the collapsed Romanized form of which yields our Gibraltar. Two hundred years of Muslim rule, beginning with the stabilizing reign of 'Abd al-Rahmaan I (r. 756-88), had seen Spain develop from a provincial outpost at the ends of the empire to a major Mediterranean power. The learned and pious 'Abd al-Rahmaan II (r. 822-52) established a brilliant formal court on the eastern caliphal model, expanded the city's great mosque, and built many smaller mosques, palaces, baths, roads, bridges, and gardens. He also began developing Cordoba's library, which in time would become the largest by far in medieval Europe. (Under 'Abd al-Rahmaan III's son and successor, al-Hakam II [r. 961-76], it held some 400,000 volumes.) Book buyers were sent to all ends of the Islamic empire, and back in Cordoba a team of calligraphers was maintained for "the rapid multiplication of new acquisitions." Smaller private and public libraries were common, and the bibliomaniacal capital hosted a huge book market, which employed some seventy copyists for the Quran alone-including many women. Women also worked as librarians, teachers, doctors, and lawyers. The new urban wonder acted as a magnet for poets and musicians in particular, the most prominent of whom was the Persian musician Ziryaab, who-legend has it-had fallen out of favor at the ninth-century Abbasid court and decided to try his luck in the West. With him Ziryaab brought the refinements of cosmopolitan Baghdad, including new hairstyles (showing the neck), seasonal wardrobes, the use of toothpaste and deodorants, orchestrated multi-course meals (at which asparagus was served), and, more to the point, his prodigious knowledge of music, poetry, art, and science. Arabic itself spread slowly but with remarkable effect, and by the mid-tenth century Jews, Christians, North-African Berber Muslims, and Christian converts were competing with the Arabs themselves for mastery of that most beautiful of languages, which became both the lingua franca of al-Andalus and the currency of high culture. Under the leadership of 'Abd al-Rahmaan III, who saw his kingdom's diversity as its strength and managed to unite the disparate communities of al-Andalus, Cordoba's population swelled, with immigrants streaming to the clean, well-lit streets of the city that one Christian poet described as "the ornament of the world."

While the Umayyad capital resembled Baghdad in almost every respect, Jewish society in al-Andalus had begun to take on a different cast from that of the socially conservative world of Babylonian Jewry. Oppressed for well over a century by the Visigothic rulers of Hispania, Jews had welcomed the Muslim invaders as saviors and no doubt proved valuable allies to the conquering foreigners, who knew neither the lay nor the language of the land. Arabic sources confirm this cooperation and note that Jews were often settled in conquered towns and entrusted with their garrisons, as the Muslim army advanced. While there were still hardships to bear, life in eighth-century Muslim Spain offered Jews opportunities they could not have dreamed of under the Visigoths. As people of the book (ahl alkitaab), Jews-like Christians-were accorded dhimmi, or protected, status. Enforcement of the regulations governing dhimmis, which varied throughout the Muslim world, were for the first several centuries relaxed in Spain, and the rate of Jewish conversion seems to have been quite low. Little by little Jews adopted Arab ways of dressing and speaking-as well as of shopping, eating, reading, singing, composing music, and writing- and they were allowed to practice an array of occupations. They farmed and owned land, managed vineyards, olive groves, and workshops, and eventually worked in medicine, textile production, trade, and even in government service. Synagogues were built and communities prospered, and Spanish Jewry enjoyed a kind of limited autonomy within the Muslim emirate. It wasn't long before North African Jews who had fled the Visigoths began returning to their homes. By the time Dunash arrived in Cordoba, Jewish intellectual life in the city was also stirring. The driving force behind that awakening was a gifted Jewish physician, Hasdai Ibn Shaprut (c. 910-75), who is the first Spanish Jew to be mentioned by name in the Arab records of the day. Born to a wealthy family that had moved to Cordoba from Jaén, on the eastern coast of Spain, Hasdai demonstrated a talent for languages, early on learning Arabic, Latin, and Romance (proto-Spanish), as well as Hebrew and Aramaic. His passion, however, was medicine, and while still a young man he acquired a measure of fame as a Cordovan physician. When, around 940, he announced that he had succeeded in compounding theriaca, a Roman miracle drug whose formula had been lost for centuries, he was summoned to an audience with the caliph and added to the ranks of his court physicians. Hasdai continued to impress 'Abd al-Rahmaan III with both his knowledge and his way with people, and soon he was appointed to the shipping division of the customs bureau, where he supervised the collection of duties from ships entering and leaving Andalusia's busy ports. From time to time the caliph also consulted Hasdai about diplomatic affairs, taking advantage of his linguistic range and his tact, and the Jewish physician helped receive delegations from the German emperor Otto I and Ordoño III, king of León, with whom he negotiated a peace treaty and whose heir (Sancho) he successfully treated for obesity. 'Abd al-Rahmaan III also appointed Hasdai to the position of nasi, or head of Andalusian Jewry, over which he had supreme authority. As nasi Hasdai engaged in foreign Jewish affairs, writing to Helena, the wife of the Byzantine emperor, asking her to protect the Byzantine Jewish community from persecution. He maintained ties with the communities of Palestine and Babylonia and sought out contact with the Khazars-the independent kingdom of Jewish converts on the plains between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains-at one stage exchanging letters with the Khazar king. As his position in the caliph's court solidified, he began to sponsor a court of his own, which he developed along the Muslim model. He supported Jewish intellectuals in a number of fields, from religious studies to science and literature. He commissioned the copying and import of books, encouraged the immigration of scholars to al-Andalus, and, over a period of some fifty years, catalyzed Spain's development as a center of Jewish culture-no longer reliant on the eastern academies. Like the Arab Andalusian courts of the time, Hasdai's had its poet. Menahem Ben Saruq was born-probably around the turn of the millennium-to a Tortosan family of modest means and came as a young man to Cordoba, which had much more to offer an aspiring intellectual than did the remote northeastern town of his birth. He was supported in the capital by Hasdai's father, Yitzhaq, while he pursued philological studies and served as the aristocratic family's house poet, composing verse to mark special occasions. In time he returned to his home in the north, where he set himself up in business, but after Hasdai's appointment to 'Abd al-Rahmaan's service, the nasi wrote to Menahem and asked him to return to Cordoba and take up a position as his Hebrew secretary. It was, in fact, Menahem who wrote to Byzantium in 948, and to the Khazar king several years later, on which occasion he described al-Andalus:

The country in which we dwell is called in the sacred tongue Sefarad, but in the language of the Arabs ... al-Andalus. The land is fat, and rivers and springs and quarried cisterns abound. Wheat and corn cover the fields, the yield of which is great. And pleasant groves and gardens of various sorts are found. All kinds of fruit trees flourish, and trees on whose leaves the silk worms feed, and silkworms we have aplenty. On our hills and in our forests the crimson worm is gathered. Saffron covers our slopes and mountains. Veins of silver and gold can be found ... and from our mountains copper is mined, and iron and tin and lead, along with sulfur, marble, porphyry and crystal ... for which merchants come from all corners of the land. And from every region and the distant islands of the sea, traders stream to it, from Egypt and the adjacent countries, bringing perfumes and spices, and precious gems.

The letter was prefaced by an impressive quasi-martial panegyric with messianic overtones. We also know that Menahem composed poems in praise of Hasdai and others, and on the death of both of Hasdai's parents-though these did little to win the affection of his patron, who seems at best to have tolerated his poet and scribe, and failed to provide him with the sort of remuneration he had promised.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

To the Reader xxi
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction 1

PART ONE: Muslim Spain (c. 950-c. 1140)

DUNASH BEN LABRAT 23
Fragment 24
Blessing for a Wedding 24
Drink, He Said 24

THE WIFE OF DUNASH 27
Will Her Love Remember? 27

YITZHAQ IBN MAR SHA'UL 28
A Fawn Sought in Spain 28

YOSEF IBN AVITOR 30
Lament for the Jews of Zion 31
A Curse 32
A Plea 33
Hymn for the New Year 33

YITZHAQ IBN KHALFOUN 35
Love in Me Stirs 35
A Gift of Cheese 36

SHMU'EL HANAGID 37
On Fleeing His City 38
The Miracle at Sea 40
The Apple 44
The Gazelle 45
Jasmine 45
In Fact I Love That Fawn 45
Mixed in Spain 46
Your Years Are Sleep 46
The House of Prayer 47
The Critique 48
On Lifting the Siege 49
The War with Yaddayir 50
On the Death of Isaac, His Brother 53
First War 58
I'd Suck Bitter Poison 59
Delay Your Speech 59
The Rich 59
People Welcome the Rich 60
If You Leave a Long-Loved Friend 60
You Who'd Be Wise 60
When You're Desperate 61
It's Heart That Discerns 61
He'll Bring You Trouble 61
Could Kings Right a People Gone Bad 61
What's Familiar Is Sometimes Distanced 62
One Who Works and Buys Himself Books 62
Three Things 62
Soar, Don't Settle 62
Man's Wisdom Is in What He Writes 63
Be Glad, She Said 63
The Multiple Troubles of Man 63
Gazing through the Night 64
Earth to Man 65
The Child at One or Two 65
I Quartered the Troops for the Night 66
Luxuries Ease 66
Why Repeat the Sins 67
At the Treasury 67
Know of the Limbs 67
You Mock Me Now 68
Time Defies and Betrays 68
The Market 68

YOSEF IBN HASDAI 70
The Qasida 71

SHELOMO IBN GABIROL 74
Truth Seekers Turn 75
I'm Prince to the Poem 76
Prologue to The Book of Grammar 76
They Asked Me as though They Were Mystified 77
See the Sun 78
On Leaving Saragossa 78
My Heart Thinks as the Sun Comes Up 81
Now the Thrushes 81
Winter with Its Ink 82
The Garden 82
The Field 83
The Bee 83
I'd Give Up My Soul Itself 84
Be Smart with Your Love 84
All in Red 85
You've Stolen My Words 85
The Altar of Song 85
The Pen 86
If You'd Live among Men 86
I Am the Man 86
Heart's Hollow 88
I Love You 89
Before My Being 90
Three Things 90
I Look for You 91
Open the Gate 91
The Hour of Song 92
Send Your Spirit 92
Angels Amassing 93
And So It Came to Nothing 94
He Dwells Forever 95
Haven't I Hidden Your Name 97
Lord Who Listens 98
I've Made You My Refuge 98
You Lie in My Palace 99
From Kingdom's Crown 99

YITZHAQ IBN GHIYYAT 111
My Wandering 112

YOSEF IBN SAHL 114
The Fleas 114
Your Poem, My Friend 115
A Complaint about the Rich 115

LEVI IBN ALTABBAAN 117
Utter His Oneness 117
Exposed 118

BAHYA IBN PAQUDA 119
Duties of the Heart 119
MOSHE IBN EZRA 121
Weak with Wine 122
The Garden 123
Bring Me My Cup 123
A Shadow 123
The Fawn 124
The Garden, the Miser 124
The Pen 125
Heart's Desire 125
That Bitter Day 127
Let Man Remember 127
The Dove 127
Why Does Time Hound Me So 128
Ancient Graves 128
If You See Me 129
Ivory Palaces 129
The World 130
My Heart's Secret 130
I Roused My Thoughts from Slumber 130
Let Man Wail 132
On the Death of His Son 132
The Blind 133
The Gazelle's Sigh 133
Gold 134
The Day to Come 134
At the Hour of Closing 135

YOSEF IBN TZADDIQ 137
A Wedding Night's Consolation 137
Lady of Grace 139

SHELOMO IBN TZAQBEL 141
Lines Inscribed on an Apple 142
Note to a Suitor Now Perplexed 142
A Fawn with Her Lashes 142

YEHUDA HALEVI 143
That Night a Gazelle 145
A Doe Washes 146
If Only Dawn 146
That Day while I Had Him 146
Another Apple 146
To Ibn al-Mu'allim 147
If Only I Could Give 147
Epithalamium 149
When a Lone Silver Hair 149
If Time 150
Inscriptions on Bowls 150
Four Riddles 150
Departure 151
On Friendship and Time 152
Slaves of Time 154
Heal Me, Lord 154
True Life 154
The Morning Stars 155
His Thresholds 155
Where Will I Find You 155
You Knew Me 156
A Doe Far from Home 156
A Dove in the Distance 157
You Slept, Then Trembling Rose 158
Love's Dwelling 158
Lord, 159
If Only I Could Be 160
Won't You Ask, Zion 162
My Heart Is in the East 164
How Long Will You Lie 164
Heart at Sea 165
My Soul Longed 167
Has a Flood Washed the World 167
In the Heart 168
Above the Abyss 168
Time Has Tossed Me 168
Be with Me 169
Along the Nile 169
This Breeze 170

PART TWO: Christian Spain and Provence (c. 1140-1492)

AVRAHAM IBN EZRA 173
Fortune's Stars 174
How It Is 175
A Cloak 175
The Flies 176
World Poetry 176
All the Rest Is Commentary 177
I. The Flood 177
II. Reading Exodus 177
III. The Miracle (at Lehi) 177
Pleasure 177
In Place 177
The Wedding Night, Continued 178
An Ancient Battle 179
Lament for Andalusian Jewry 181
Elegy for a Son 182
My Hunger 184
Sent Out from the Glory 184
Lord, I Have Heard 184
My God, 185
To the Soul 185
Blessèd Is He Who Fears 186
I Bow Down 188
Children of Exile 189
I Call to Him 189
You Whose Hearts Are Asleep 190

YITZHAQ IBN EZRA 192
On the Death of Yehuda HaLevi 193
Over His Boy 194
Conversion 195

YOSEF QIMHI 196
Love for the World 197
Always Be Vigilant 197
Consider This 197
Suffer Your Sorrow 197
On Wisdom 198
If You Hear Someone Insult You 198
Wait and Be Saved 198
Wealth 199
Silence and Speech 199

YOSEF IBN ZABARA 200
Sweet and Sour 201
My Ex 201
Look at These People 202
The Physician 202

ANATOLI BAR YOSEF 203
The Test of Poetry 203
Motto 204

YEHUDA IBN SHABBETAI 205
From The Offering of Yehuda the Misogynist 206
I. Pharaoh's Wisdom 206
II. The Misogynist in Love 206
III. A Raised Offering 207
IV. Two Things 207
V. The Sage Lies 207

YEHUDA ALHARIZI 208
Born to Baseness 209
The Hypocrite 210
The Jerk 210
A Miser in Mosul 210
The Miser 211
On Zion's Holy Hill 211
Boys: Two Poems 212
I. If Amram's Son 212
II. An Answer 212
Masters of Song 212
Measure for Measure 212
A Lover Wandered 213
How Long, My Fawn 213
Curses' Composition 213
A Flashing Sword 214
Palindrome for a Patron 214
A Poem No Patron Has Ever Heard 215
Admiration for the Patron Again I'll Prove 215
Two Poems on Karaism 215
I. For 215
II. Against 216
Virtue 216
I'll Set Out a Verse and Lay the Foundation . . . 216

YA'AQOV BEN ELAZAR 218
The Hypocrite's Beard 219
Four Poems on Subtle Love 220
I. The Doe 220
II. A Kiss 220
III. A Lover's Transgression 220
IV. Spats and Squabbles 220

AVRAHAM IBN HASDAI 221
Watch Out 222
ProPortion 222
Age as Author 222
Which Is More Bitter 223
The Lying Word 223
The Monk's Advice 223
Advice for a Future King 223
I. Wisdom's Mantle 223
II. Don't Believe 224
III. The Hyssop and the Cedar 224

MEIR HALEVI ABULAFIA 225
Plea for a Tax Break 226
(L)attitude 226
Fighting Time 226

YITZHAQ HASNIRI 227
On the Worship of Wood and a Fool 228

MESHULLAM DEPIERA 229
The Poet 230
On a New Book by Maimonides 230
Before You Take Up Your Pen 230
How Could You Press for Song 231
As One with the Morning Stars 232

MOSHE BEN NAHMAN (NAHMANIDES) 233
Before the World Ever Was 234
From "One Hundred Verses" 237
SHEM TOV IBN FALAQERA 240
Career Counseling 241
A Mystery 241
On Poets and Poetry 241
Why God Made You 242
The Fool Thinks 242
Poverty's War 242

YITZHAQ IBN SAHULA 243
The Cynic Speaks 244
On Humility 244

AVRAHAM ABULAFIA 245
From The Book of the Letter 247

AVRAHAM BEN SHMU'EL 252
To Whom among the Avengers of Blood 253
YOSEF GIQATILLA 254
The Nut Garden 255

TODROS ABULAFIA 256
I've Labored in Love 258
She Said She Wanted 258
The Day You Left 258
That Fine Gazelle 259
They Fight with Me over Desire 259
That Girl Emerged 259
May My Tongue 259
There's Nothing Wrong in Wanting a Woman 260
Strong Poet, Weak Poet 260
Plaster and Pearls 261
Nothing Left to Say 261
Teachers and Writers 261
Before the King 262
My King 262
Poems from Prison 262
I. As Love Lives 262
II. Treacherous Time 263
III. The Filthy Lay in Darkness with Me 263
IV. My Rings Have Fallen 263
V. Is It the Lord 264
Time Tries as I Drift 264
The Sea Casts Up Mire and Mud 264
On a Bible Written by Shmu'el HaNagid 265
Time Spreads Its Nets 265
Old Age Is Double-Edged 266
Perversion's Pigeons 266
My Thinking Wove 266
The Lord Is Good and So I'm Tormented 267
Defiled and Pure Are One 267
On Hearing Church Bells 267
I Take Delight in My Cup and Wine 268

NAHUM 270
Winter Has Waned 270

AVRAHAM HABEDERSHI 272
Why the Poet Refuses to Fight 273
Your Muse 273
Lament for a Foe 274
The Poet's Distress 274

YITZHAQ HAGORNI 275
Would You Tell Me 276
HaGorni's Lament 276

YEDAYA HAPENINI 278
The World Is a Raging Sea 279

AVNER [OF BURGOS?] 281
The Last Words of My Desire 282

QALONYMOS BEN QALONYMOS 284
On Becoming a Woman 285

YITZHAK POLGAR 287
Faith's Philosophy, Philosophy's Faith 288

SHEM TOV ARDUTIEL (SANTOB DE CARRIÓN) 289
From The Battles of the Pen and the Scissors 290
I. Writer, You Hold 290
II. To Praise the Pen 291
III. Tomorrow I'll Write 291
IV. Enter the Scissors 291
V. Work I Was Cut Out to Do 291
VI. The Pen Fights Back 292
VII. The Scissors Longed 292

SHMU'EL IBN SASSON 293
Man's Peril 294
Why Most Poets Are Poor 294
They Will Be Tried 296

MOSHE NATAN 297
Prison 297
From "The Ten Commandments" 298
Clothes Make the Man 298

SHELOMO DEPIERA 299
Thinkers with Thinking 301
The Bee and the Grumbler 301
Medieval Arthritis 301
Winter in Monzón 302
After Conversion 303
Tabernacles: A Prayer 303
A Prayer for Rain and Sustenance 303
This Year's Wine: 1417 304

VIDAL BENVENISTE 305
Advice from Wives 306
What Girls Want 306
To a Poet-Friend Too Much in Need 307
Poems for a Doe in a Garden 307
A Thank You Note 308
Think about This 308
Beyond Words 308
My Son, before You Were Born 309
To One Who Said His Heart for Verse Was Adamant 309
Clarity 309
What Goes Around Comes . . . 309
The Tongue Speaks and the Hand Records 310

SHELOMO HALEVI (PABLO DE SANTA MARIA) 312
Memory's Wine 313

SHELOMO BONAFED 314
World Gone Wrong 315
A Vision of Ibn Gabirol 317
Wherever You Go 318

YITZHAQ ALAHDAB 320
Inflation 320
Another Flea 321
Security 321
The Elderly Asked if the Doctors 321
As Sorcerers Spread 321
Being Poor 322
State of the Art; or, Poetry Wails 322
Renaissance Man 323

MOSHE REMOS 326
Last Words 327

'ELI BEN YOSEF [HAVILLIO?] 330
Who Soars 330

MOSHE IBN HABIB 331
Account 332
You Come to the House of God 332

SA'ADIA IBN DANAAN 333
Enmity Smolders 334
Hordes of Readers 334
Mixed Messenger 334
She Trapped Me 334
Chiasmus for a Doe 335

Notes 337
Glossary 527

What People are Saying About This

Richard Howard

The finest labor of poetic translation I have seen in many years.... An entire revelation.
— Richard Howard, University of Houston

Richard Howard II

The finest labor of poetic translation I have seen in many years.... An entire revelation.
(Richard Howard, University of Houston)

Ross Brann

A sterling work of translation of unsurpassed scope, quality and importance.
— Ross Brann, Cornell University

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2010 TLS Risa Domb/Porjes Translation Prize, Jewish Book Council

Winner of the 2007 R. R. Hawkins Award, Association of American Publishers

Winner of the 2007 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Humanities, Association of American Publishers

Winner of the 2007 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Literature, Language, and Linguistics, Association of American Publishers

Winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture

Peter Cole, Winner of a 2010 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

"Virtually stagnant since late Biblical times, Hebrew poetry and the language itself would be transformed by a succession of poets of genius and their imitators. In Peter Cole's rich new anthology, the extent of their astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English.... His versions are masterly."—Eric Ormsby, New York Times Book Review

"Perpetually astonishing. The central figures in Peter Cole's anthology are great by any standards.... [They] provoke love in any reader of Hebrew literature, and by [a] miracle of Cole's own creation, in any reader of little or no Hebrew who directly confronts the work of this major poet-translator.... Superb."—Harold Bloom, New York Review of Books

"The book is a treasure trove, a labour of love and exceptional erudition, which will open up to the reader a world of poetry and culture as rich as anything in human civilization."—Times Literary Supplement

"...[Cole] has performed an enormous service and produced a book which is by turns moving, charming, and funny. No one after this will be able to write a book on medieval poetry without taking the Hebrew and Arabic poets of Spain into account."—Gabriel Josipovici,Times Literary Supplement

"Meticulously edited and captivating anthology.... [P]oetic scholarship at its best.... [A] major translation project."—Marjorie Perloff, Bookforum

Praise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton):"Cole's translations . . . shimmer: they convey the power and mystique of the original."—Choice

Praise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton): "Fresh, worldly, intimate, and wise."—Booklist

Praise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton): "Cole's vigorous inventive translation is equal to the task of rendering [the] work [of a poet] whose range encompassed commerce and God, war and wine. HaNagid emerges as a man of identifiably modern—even enlightened—breadth, even as the rest of Europe languished in its Dark Ages."—Publishers Weekly

"Traversing five centuries, four hundred poems, and fifty poets, the anthology represents a remarkable literature that evolved and flourished between the East and the West, between sacred and the profane, and amid the collision and collusion of traditions, religions, and languages . . . all bolstered by Cole's extensive introductions, biographies, commentary, and glossaries."—American Poet

"Peter Cole offers us an unprecedented gift, bringing to life a body of Hebrew poetry that, wrote Harold Bloom, can at its best 'rival the magnificences of Scripture'....[Cole's] achievement in bringing us this volume is as death-defying an act as any ever undertaken by the poets he presents within its pages."—Esther Allen, Bomb Magazine

"The Dream of the Poem offers English readers a substantial, unfailingly elegant anthology of medieval Hebrew poetry in translation. Overall, it is a remarkable achievement. . . . [I]t brings to life a world we have long yearned to share more eloquently with those who could not read it for themselves."—Susan L. Einbinder, Speculum

"The anthology appears in a series devoted to translated poetry, and is designed to be accessible to general readers. Yet it is also suitable for use as a course book: there are helpful introductions and annotations, and the publisher has made the Hebrew originals available on-line. The book is a true labour of love, and should win new readers to this wonderfully rich body of poetry."—Nicholas De Lange, Journal of Jewish Studies

"Seldom if ever has medieval Iberian literature received such attention from the English-speaking academic world, much less the larger American reading public, and it speaks to the importance of Cole's translations, which have given voice to this material in a way that other translations have not. For scholars of Spanish literature these translations are important in that they make accessible to non-Hebrew speakers a large body of Judeo-Iberian poetry, some of it not previously available in translation."—Michelle Hamilton, Bulletin of Spanish Studies

"The book constitutes a milestone that will not be easy to surpass. May this book inspire the next generation of researchers to develop further research aims in Medieval Hebrew literature!"—Arie Schippers, Review of Middle Eastern Studies

From the Publisher

The book constitutes a milestone that will not be easy to surpass. May this book inspire the next generation of researchers to develop further research aims in Medieval Hebrew literature!

Review of Middle Eastern Studies - Arie Schippers

Seldom if ever has medieval Iberian literature received such attention from the English-speaking academic world, much less the larger American reading public, and it speaks to the importance of Cole's translations, which have given voice to this material in a way that other translations have not. For scholars of Spanish literature these translations are important in that they make accessible to non-Hebrew speakers a large body of Judeo-Iberian poetry, some of it not previously available in translation.

Bulletin of Spanish Studies - Michelle Hamilton

The anthology appears in a series devoted to translated poetry, and is designed to be accessible to general readers. Yet it is also suitable for use as a course book: there are helpful introductions and annotations, and the publisher has made the Hebrew originals available on-line. The book is a true labour of love, and should win new readers to this wonderfully rich body of poetry.

Journal of Jewish Studies - Nicholas De Lange

The Dream of the Poem offers English readers a substantial, unfailingly elegant anthology of medieval Hebrew poetry in translation. Overall, it is a remarkable achievement. . . . [I]t brings to life a world we have long yearned to share more eloquently with those who could not read it for themselves.

Speculum - Susan L. Einbinder

Peter Cole offers us an unprecedented gift, bringing to life a body of Hebrew poetry that, wrote Harold Bloom, can at its best 'rival the magnificences of Scripture'....[Cole's] achievement in bringing us this volume is as death-defying an act as any ever undertaken by the poets he presents within its pages.

Bomb Magazine - Esther Allen

Traversing five centuries, four hundred poems, and fifty poets, the anthology represents a remarkable literature that evolved and flourished between the East and the West, between sacred and the profane, and amid the collision and collusion of traditions, religions, and languages . . . all bolstered by Cole's extensive introductions, biographies, commentary, and glossaries.

American Poet

Praise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton): "Fresh, worldly, intimate, and wise.

Booklist

Praise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton):"Cole's translations . . . shimmer: they convey the power and mystique of the original.

Choice

Meticulously edited and captivating anthology.... [P]oetic scholarship at its best.... [A] major translation project.

BookForum - Marjorie Perloff

...[Cole] has performed an enormous service and produced a book which is by turns moving, charming, and funny. No one after this will be able to write a book on medieval poetry without taking the Hebrew and Arabic poets of Spain into account.

Times Literary Supplement - Gabriel Josipovici

The book is a treasure trove, a labour of love and exceptional erudition, which will open up to the reader a world of poetry and culture as rich as anything in human civilization.

Times Literary Supplement

Perpetually astonishing. The central figures in Peter Cole's anthology are great by any standards.... [They] provoke love in any reader of Hebrew literature, and by [a] miracle of Cole's own creation, in any reader of little or no Hebrew who directly confronts the work of this major poet-translator.... Superb.

New York Review of Books - Harold Bloom

Virtually stagnant since late Biblical times, Hebrew poetry and the language itself would be transformed by a succession of poets of genius and their imitators. In Peter Cole's rich new anthology, the extent of their astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English.... His versions are masterly.

New York Times Book Review - Eric Ormsby

The book is a treasure trove, a labour of love and exceptional erudition, which will open up to the reader a world of poetry and culture as rich as anything in human civilization.

Time Magazines Literary Supplement

The book constitutes a milestone that will not be easy to surpass. May this book inspire the next generation of researchers to develop further research aims in Medieval Hebrew literature!
— Arie Schippers

Review of Middle Eastern Studies

Seldom if ever has medieval Iberian literature received such attention from the English-speaking academic world, much less the larger American reading public, and it speaks to the importance of Cole's translations, which have given voice to this material in a way that other translations have not. For scholars of Spanish literature these translations are important in that they make accessible to non-Hebrew speakers a large body of Judeo-Iberian poetry, some of it not previously available in translation.
— Michelle Hamilton

Bulletin of Spanish Studies

The anthology appears in a series devoted to translated poetry, and is designed to be accessible to general readers. Yet it is also suitable for use as a course book: there are helpful introductions and annotations, and the publisher has made the Hebrew originals available on-line. The book is a true labour of love, and should win new readers to this wonderfully rich body of poetry.
— Nicholas De Lange

Journal of Jewish Studies

The Dream of the Poem offers English readers a substantial, unfailingly elegant anthology of medieval Hebrew poetry in translation. Overall, it is a remarkable achievement. . . . [I]t brings to life a world we have long yearned to share more eloquently with those who could not read it for themselves.
— Susan L. Einbinder

Speculum

Peter Cole offers us an unprecedented gift, bringing to life a body of Hebrew poetry that, wrote Harold Bloom, can at its best 'rival the magnificences of Scripture'....[Cole's] achievement in bringing us this volume is as death-defying an act as any ever undertaken by the poets he presents within its pages.
— Esther Allen

Bomb Magazine

Meticulously edited and captivating anthology.... [P]oetic scholarship at its best.... [A] major translation project.
— Marjorie Perloff

BookForum

Perpetually astonishing. The central figures in Peter Cole's anthology are great by any standards.... [They] provoke love in any reader of Hebrew literature, and by [a] miracle of Cole's own creation, in any reader of little or no Hebrew who directly confronts the work of this major poet-translator.... Superb.
— Harold Bloom

New York Review of Books

Virtually stagnant since late Biblical times, Hebrew poetry and the language itself would be transformed by a succession of poets of genius and their imitators. In Peter Cole's rich new anthology, the extent of their astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English.... His versions are masterly.
— Eric Ormsby

New York Times Book Review

Meticulously edited and captivating anthology.... [P]oetic scholarship at its best.... [A] major translation project.
— Marjorie Perloff

Bookforum