The Dream of the Poem. Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492. Translated, Edited, and Introduced by Peter Cole. The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
For the Table of Contents, Introduction and notes thereto, and pointed Hebrew texts of the translated poems (an essential resource!), go here. The better known poets – Shmuel HaNagid, Shelomo ibn Gabirol, Moshe ibn Ezra, and Yehudah HaLevi – are well-represented, but so are many more.
This is a splendid volume in a splendid series. I count it a great joy to be able to read Aeschylus, Horace, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Leopardi and Rilke in the original, but my understanding is enriched if I read the originals alongside the translations and notes of Peter Burian, Sydney Alexander, Peter Cole, Eamon Grennan, and Rika Lesser, respectively.
It will seem strange to most that a student of ancient Hebrew poetry should take an interest in medieval Hebrew poetry. So far as I am aware, the last Alttestamentler to pay attention to medieval Hebrew poetry was the great Franz Delitzsch.
The days are past when members of the guild were at home, as were August Dillmann, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Wellhausen, Heinrich Ewald, and Franz Delitzsch, in multiple languages and literatures of antiquity and the middle ages, both classical and Semitic. The trend towards specialization has yielded enormous fruits, but is not without its downsides.
In my view, the intelligence of the student of ancient Hebrew poetry is impoverished if she or he has not spent time with the poetry of ben Sira, the hodayot, the piyyutim, and the great poets canvassed in translation by Peter Cole.
At its best, translation involves interpretation on multiple levels. In the case of poetry, that means interpreting sound and rhythm, not only syntax and lexicon. Nothing can replace reading a poem in the original, but an excellent translation is a great help to someone who reads the original.
Missed nuances come to the fore. One’s understanding of the whole is sharpened. Peter Cole’s translations are helpful to the student of the originals.
To be sure, the original poems are best savored first of all. Then comparisons are in order, with existing translations, other poems, and other poetic traditions. A comparison of the aural and rhythmic texture, use of metaphor, and exploitation of the lexicon of medieval Hebrew poetry with the same features of ancient Hebrew poetry is a study in contrasts.
The school of translation I follow is summed up in the maxim: “as literal as possible, as free as necessary.” The maxim is especially difficult to apply to poetry. For samples of my work, go here, here, and here. The translation technique of Peter Cole is less interested in reproducing the syntax and the precise wording of the original than I.
Cole’s translation is an advance over that by T. Carmi on several counts. First of all, it strives to capture something of the aural texture and rhythm of the original. The effort is successful. Secondly, it is laid out in such a way that the poetic structure is visible to the eye. On the other hand, Cole’s departures from the base text are more frequent than one might wish.
A poem by Dunash ben Labrat (mid-tenth century) may illustrate. In a separate document, I put excerpts from the poem and Cole’s translation side by side. For comparison’s sake, I then put the poem and my translation side by side. My translation is indebted to Cole’s, but also goes its own way.
The volume under review complements but does not replace Cole’s earlier volumes in the same series: Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid and Selected Poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol. The introductions, notes, and bibliographies in The Dream of the Poem, I’m happy to report, are uniformly helpful. Along with the pointed Hebrew editions of the originals available online, the volume may serve as a gateway into the wonders of medieval Hebrew poetry.
Another helpful resource: www.medievalhebrewpoetry.org. Check it out.