The Book of Tahkemoni: Jewish Tales From Medieval Spain (review)

282ReviewsLa coránica 33.1, 2004 al-HarïzI,Judah. The Book ofTahkemoni: Jewish Tales From Medieval Spain. Translated, Explicated, and Annotated by David Simha Segal. London : The Littman Library ofJewish Civilization, 2001. xxi, 710pp. ISBN 1874774 -98-6 The Tahkemoni is very much a book at a crossroads, both in tenus of its origin and its study in modem academia. Its author, Judah al-HanzT, lived in Toledo at the turn of the thirteenth century, a time when Christian nile had long ceased to be novel, and when the Jews and Muslims of the city' had already undergone a great deal of hispanization in their daily lives. However , the literary values showcased by al-Harîzî in the work are those of the Andalusi tradition, the language and prosody of the renowned poets of the Andalusi Golden Age (tenth through eleventh centuries) such as Shmuel Hanagid, Shlomoh Ihn Gabirol, and Yehuda Halevi. These and other poets were iiistmmental in adapting Arabic poetics and stylistics to the Hebrew language, and in particular for pioneering the use of Hebrew for secular compositions intended for an audience outside of the synagogue. Yet they lived in an Arabic-speaking world, and were educated in the classics of Arabic literature and science alongside with their Muslim counterparts, including intellectuals such as Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Quzmän, and the poetess Wallâda the Umayyad. By contrast, al-Harîzî and his contemporaries lived in Christian Spain, away from the centers of Arabic literary ailture that had nurtured secular Hebrew literature. One of the most important undertakings of al-Harlzfs generation was the translation of literary and scientific texts bv Jewish and Muslim authors from Arabic into Hebrew, the literary lingua franca of the Jewish communities in Christian Europe. As part of this wave of translation activity spearheaded by the Ibn Tibbon family, al-HarlzI undertook the translation of al-Harlrl's maqämät, one of the greatest classics of the Arabic literature of the 'Abbäsid era. The maqama is a genre of rhymed prose narrative interspersed with lyric poetry. It was invented (in Arabic) by Badr al-Zaman al-Hamadhänl in the late tenth century and perfected by al-HarTrl in the late eleventh. AlHar îzî was detemiined to mine al-Harlrl's ingenuity for his own means, or in Segal's words, he "arose and plucked the Arab's rose" (17). After finishing his translation, titled Mahberot Ui'el, al-Harlzï decided he would reclaim the maqâma genre for Hebrew literature, and began to write his own fifty maqämät portraying the misadventures of the narrator Heyman the Ezrahite and his antagonist, the rogue Hever the Kenite. La CORoNICA 33.1 (Fall, 2004): 282-85 Reviews283 The language of Tahkemoni is a mixture of Arabic poetic imagery and rhetorical figures couched in the language of the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, the only poetic register available to medieval Hebrew authors. The level of Biblical allusion in secular medieval Hebrew writing is astoundingly high, and it is not at all infrequent to see entire phrases of scripture reproduced verbatim within an original composition. Often the biblical language is slightly altered to effect a pun or other play on words, and an intimate knowledge of biblical Hebrew is essential to any serious reading of the Tahkemoni. How then, to translate such a work into English? The task faced bv David Simha Segal is almost as daunting as that faced by al-Harîzî himself when he decided to translate al-Harlrl's Arabic maqämät into Hebrew. How to reproduce the very subtle marriage of Arabic figures and biblical Hebrew language for an English-speaking readership? Is it more important to reproduce the music, rhythm, and sound of the original or to make the literal meaning clear? In the first English translation of the Tahkemoni. Reichert opted for the latter, but in the current translation, David Segal opts for the fonner, matching al-Harîzî's rhyming prose and lyric poetry with an English verse translation . Segal explains his reasons for choosing a rhyming translation in his Translator's Preface (xiii-xxi): he aims to reproduce the stylistic and stnictural...