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  • Fighting Time with Peter Cole:Notes on His Poetry and Translations of Hebrew Epigrammatic Verse
  • Luis M. Girón Negrón

A Ángel Sáenz-Badillos y Judit Targarona Borrás, maestros inigualables de esta poesía

In his splendid monograph on Shem Tov de Carrión's Proverbios morales, the Hispanist Tom Perry envisions three different types of readers for the fourteenth-century gnomic poem. As a Jewish writer in Christian Spain, Shem Tov was keenly aware of the multiple audiences his work could reach. His verses, Perry argues (The Moral Proverbs 74-85), were interlaced accordingly with intertextual cues to different layers of meaning, subtle allusions that invited as many levels of engagement and of aesthetic response. Readers with a modicum of literary sensibility, who were attentive to choices of language and form, could pick any coherent portion of the Proverbios and tease out an idea or intuition which Shem Tov expresses artistically with his linguistic prime matter: its poetic imagery and verbal play, its phonetic and rhythmic [End Page 183] effects, what Peter Cole memorably describes as the "unparaphrasable weave of the writing . . . the ceremonial equipment of the verse that makes it a poem and not a theme" (Selected Poems 13). A learned reader more attuned to specific cultural referents could also recognize the poetic traditions or sources -especially among other Hispano-Jewish poets and their Arabic counterparts- that Shem Tov refashions to great effect and whose scholarly elucidation teaches us so much about medieval poetic composition. Then there were the most learned among his Castilian Jewish readers and listeners, those steeped in rabbinic learning, who had the Hebrew Bible at their fingertips and could effortlessly summon the Scriptural context of even the slightest hint -a turn of phrase, a fragmentary allusion, even if in Spanish translation rather than in the Hebrew original- to gauge whether or not Shem Tov was trying to tell them something, just them, and, if so, what precisely.

To make his point, Perry parses a well-known passage on the vicissitudes of Fortune (vv. 89-112 in Perry's edition of Shem Tov's Proverbios morales, 11-12; also see stanzas 34-39 in Díaz-Mas and Mota's edition, 127-29), a series of stanzas where Shem Tov belabors three poetic images, two of which can be traced back to an Arabic versified epigram, but all within the frame of a biblical allusion that codifies for fellow Castilian Jews a poignant message of hope behind its somber façade.

It is not my intention to rehearse in full Perry's lovely exercise in Rezeption-forschungen, but to set up my brief laus Petri against the questions it raises. Perry's primary goal in his discussion was, after all, to show how the Jewish poet managed to communicate with a variety of medieval addressees. However, his tripartite taxonomy provides additional food for thought both about Peter Cole's gorgeous translations and about other such efforts to incorporate Hispano-Jewish poetry into the Weltliteratur pantheon.

Modern readers are faced with an interpretive quandary similar to the one Perry imagines for Shem Tov's contemporaries, an issue that I encounter most vividly when I am presenting these materials in comparative literature courses. How does one teach students to appreciate the power and beauty of a medieval Hebrew poem in English translation? How does one convey the [End Page 184] world it evokes, the plurality of readings it may inspire or just what it aims "to be" rather than mean -an appreciation of the poem as poem in Archibald MacLeish's sense- when divorced in translation from its own language, its cultural referents and the specificity of a message for its Jewish recipients at times imbricated in the cento-like texture of its learned biblical allusions and rabbinic quotes. Students who do not know Hebrew encounter these poems once removed from the original, able to engage them just like the first tier of readers envisioned by Perry, based on their appreciation for imagery and form, language and content as far as the translation conveys it and, beyond that, dependent as well on translator notes, scholarly apparatus, professorial glosses and ancillary readings for disparate glimpses...

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