Introduction
Rent from DeepDyve- Introduction
Peter Cole's The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Chritian Spain, 950-1492 offers readers a set of sterling literary translations in a collection of unsurpassed scope, quality and importance. In some ways The Dream of the Poem is such a richly diverse selection of Hebrew verse from medieval Iberia -representing fifty-four poets spanning a period of more than five centuries- that it offers the English reader for the first time a sense of what Hebrew readers must have experienced with publication of Jefim Schirmann's four-volume collection of Hebrew Poetry from Spain and Provence, which aimed to validate the medieval Hebrew literary corpus produced in Spain within the canon of world literature.
The Dream of the Poem is a significant contribution to world literature in its own right. Whatever one's views on Derrida's approach to literary translation and originality, The Dream of the Poem involves more than Cole's luminous literary artistry. Its publication also constitutes one of those rare moments in which an entire field of literary production that was the preserve of only an expert few is opened to a wider learned audience. The Dream of the Poem expands the audience of readers of Hebrew poetry from medieval Iberia to [End Page 163] include Arabists, Hispanists, and other medievalists. Cole's introduction provides an excellent literary and cultural historical sketch of Hebrew poetry in Spain, and the biographical entries and comments regarding poetics and rhetoric assist the reader in navigating what may be unfamiliar. The copious and rich notes Cole provides to the poems also offer the more serious student, including the Hebrew reader who may already be familiar with the original texts or looking at them for the first time, the opportunity to reflect on the place of the poems in Hebrew literary history and on their poetics and intertextual mechanisms. Abundant references to Arabic, Romance and English literature assist the comparatist in negotiating the challenging terrain imprinted by the medieval Hebrew.
Speaking of comparative literature, Mario J. Valdés and Linda Hutcheon assert that "any monolithic construction of a 'national' literary history risks marginalizing or even excluding the literary creations of those working within those borders but in other languages or other cultural traditions" (3). To its great credit, La corónica was arguably the first professional journal for Hispanists to open its pages to scholars working on Arabic and Hebrew literature produced in pre-modern Iberia. True to form, the editors invited me to organize this special forum dedicated to Peter Cole's work.
The four scholars represented engage The Dream of the Poem from diverse perspectives: Jonathan Decter, a comparative-minded Hebrew literary historian, situates The Dream within the surprisingly long history of English anthology-translations of medieval Hebrew before elegantly addressing The Dream as an "anthology for our time"; Luis Girón, a comparative Iberian literary historian and critic, meditates upon translation and comparative literature and takes a very close look at Cole's renderings of some epigrammatic verse; Adena Tanenbaum, a medieval Hebrew literary historian with a special interest in the conceptual elements of the poetry, presents a scholar's appreciation and critique of Cole's approach to literary translation; and María Rosa Menocal, well known to readers of La corónica as one who defies categorization, offers an homage to Peter Cole, perhaps inspired by Borges. Finally, Peter Cole, poet-dreamer, translator-interpreter, offers a reflective response of his own to his four astute and inspired readers. [End Page 164]
Works Cited
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