In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • A Gathering for Our Time:The Dream of the Poem as an Anthology
  • Jonathan P. Decter

Peter Cole's The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 offers fresh translations of a rich corpus of Hebrew verse, some known to English reading audiences, some presented here for the first time. In addition to establishing himself as a fine poet in his own right, Cole had already applied his poetic talent to translating select poems of two of the great Hebrew poets of al-Andalus, Samuel Ha-Nagid and Solomon Ibn Gabirol. His translation style mixes the contemporary with the archaic, eschewing the Elizabethan and Victorian styles of earlier translators (what Cole calls a "wax-museum-like school of translation", 17), abandoning the rhyme of the original, but nonetheless preserving many idioms and allusions strange to the English ear within a sound world that gives that same ear thrill, aiming first and foremost to re-create something of the original's power and force. But it is not Cole's translation method that I wish to address here - this [End Page 167] is best left to other translators. Rather, I wish to discuss The Dream of the Poem as an anthology, pointing first to a few of the early English anthologies (between 1851 and 1917) that include the Hebrew poets of Spain, and then returning to the contemporary intellectual, cultural and political worlds to which Cole's volume speaks most eloquently.1

Of all literary forms, the anthology might appear, at first glance, to be the one in which an author comments least upon the material being presented (whether the editor includes texts in the original language only, his or her own translations, or the translations of others). Especially when there are no introductory or critical notes, it would seem that the compiler simply brings together materials as they truly exist, allowing the reader an opportunity for a convenient perusal of literary history. Yet, in the very process of sifting through materials and selecting texts, giving certain authors greater representation than others, choosing principles of organization and juxtaposing texts in specific orderings, the anthologist creates a narrative of literary history and suggests meaning.2 No anthology can escape being a partial representation of a literary corpus, and every anthology is shadowed by its own "anti-anthology" - the body of texts not selected.

Anthologies are written for their own historical moments. They generally presume, seek to create, or have the effect of creating literary canons, collections of texts from bygone eras deemed relevant to a contemporary community for preservation and interpretation. The selection of texts can be informed by any number of motivating factors that pertain to aesthetic criteria, moral standards, modes of self-representation, nationalism, and the intended use of texts (performative, contemplative, devotional, etc.). It has been argued convincingly that many literary canons were established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to establish the boundaries of communities; Gregory Jusdanis writes, "[T]he canon serves as a utopian site [End Page 168] of continuous textuality in which a nation, a class, or an individual may find an undifferentiated identity" (59). In the case of nations, canons -and anthologies with them- allow for a staking out of intellectual territory that parallels physical territorial claims.

Jewish anthologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served as sites for the exploration of cultural identities, especially as Jews increasingly identified themselves as a "nation" whose past could be reconstructed and reclaimed in the same way as that of the German, French or Greek nations. This was the case whether the anthologies were produced in German by scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism), in Hebrew by Zionist intellectuals, or in English by British and American scholars, rabbis, and translators, though each type of anthology imagined community differently and was directed toward a different purpose. An anthology could stand as a monument to a religious past within a modern, secular Jewish context or could be collected for devotional purposes in the spirit of religious revival; it could demonstrate the Jewish contribution to universal quests for truth and beauty or could stress a singular fascination with the...

pdf

Share