"The Wrong Side of a Turkey Tapestry": Peter Cole and Academic Translations of Medieval Hebrew Poetry

In his preface to The Dream of the Poem, Peter Cole confesses that his monumental new anthology "was born of a fascination that evolved into addiction" (xxi). Cole's enchantment with the medieval Hebrew poetry of Spain and absorption with its translation are apparent not only from this crowning accomplishment, but also from his two earlier Princeton University Press volumes, one devoted to the poems of Samuel Hanagid (1996) and the other to those of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (2001).¹ All three collections are proof of Cole's innate and deeply felt sympathy with these poets and their art and artistry; his immersion in their intellectual and cultural worlds; and his consuming desire to foster a latter-day convivencia by making their work compelling, immediate, and fresh for the Hebrewless reader encountering it for the first time. It is this last, overarching concern with the English reader's response to medieval Hebrew poetry that I would like to address here. Fuelled, in part, by an explicit dissatisfaction with academic translations, Cole's elegant, updated idiom aims to convince the twenty-first century English reader that this poetry is worth reading. So, too, do his apologia for a corpus that should, by rights, be better known: "The best of that radically new secular and religious verse produced in Muslim Andalusia and Christian Spain ranks with the finest poetry of the European Middle Ages - or, for that matter, of any medieval era" (The Dream of the Poem 1). The challenge, obviously, is how to translate in a way that conveys something of the poets' Judeo-Arabic cultural and aesthetic ideals while also communicating this "curiously alloyed" poetry's power, sensuality, urbanity, eloquence, playfulness, intellectual sophistication, and formidable command of classical Jewish sources.

In a penetrating critique published in the Yale Review in 2006, Cole laments the artless and leaden quality of much scholarly translation, which tends to be blind and deaf to the beauty and potency of the poetry's supple and sinuous lines, produced as it is by individuals who have "lost all feeling for the material, the visceral link to the thing itself " (52). He tells us that translators who are themselves poets view with dismay, and not a little horror, "an ingrown, near-sighted academic literature . . . hobbled by footnotes and settlings of professional accounts" (52). Scholars, on the other hand, dismiss poet-translators for playing fast and loose with the original text, standing as they do "at the furthest remove from the source" (53). Having set up this dichotomy, Cole goes on to say that, in the translation of medieval Hebrew poetry, there can be "scholarship" without "art", but that it would be unwise for the artist-translator to ignore entirely the contextualization and insight afforded by scholarly research (53). Already in his two earlier volumes of translations, Cole provides the interested reader with exemplary endnotes and bibliographies, yet even as he mines the secondary literature, he betrays a certain ambivalence toward the academic study of Andalusian Hebrew poetry. "Perhaps the primary obstacle facing the contemporary reader of medieval Hebrew poetry is the overstuffed critical baggage of its ornament, which the textbooks would have us drag about on our way from line to line and poem to poem", he writes in his introduction to Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (11). Parallels to English metaphysical poetry may be "classroom-correct", insofar as both bodies of work treat conventional themes as well as abstruse conceits in elevated and archaic diction, marked by ornamentation and mannerism. But translations that mimic the Metaphysical poets strike Cole as aesthetically inauthentic: "reconstructed" sixteenth-century English verse does not produce the same effect on us that poetry composed in classical Hebrew would have had on the Arabophone Jews of eleventh-century Andalusia. Such renderings are also culturally and historically misleading, for they imply "that Christian England is in some fundamental respect equivalent to Judeo-Muslim Spain" (25). These criticisms are reiterated in The Dream of the Poem (17-18), although here the ambivalence has largely given way to accommodation, and in...