Response

The rabbis warn that a serious scholar is permitted no more in the way of pride in his work than an eighth of an eighth of its measure. Nor, however, they're quick to add, is he allowed any less. And the same, I think, should hold true for a literary translator, especially the English translator of medieval Hebrew poetry - who is always walking that tightrope stretched between East and West, knowledge and sensation, meaning and music, humility and presumption (each set of poles with its past and present aspects). There is so very much going on in these Arabized Hebrew poems; thinking that one might account for the whole of it is ludicrous. And yet, such is the odd enterprise translation becomes that unless one presumes to be able to get the gist and even the geist of the original composition, one will come away with absolutely nothing of value at all.

As though that weren't a sufficiently dizzying proposition, a later commentary on that same rabbinic dictum about scholarly confidence worries that even this one-sixty-fourth measure might be excessive; it interprets the Talmudic figures in question as referring to the eighth verse of the eighth weekly reading from the Torah, which according to one interpretation says: "I have grown small through all the kindnesses" (Genesis 32:11). That, suggests the Vilna Gaon, is cause for gratification. And again, this reaches me through the hedge of translation, for I have, over the course of some twenty-plus years of engagement with the Hebrew poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain, been made small in the very best -and also sometimes the worst- ways by the kindnesses of scholars distant and near, dead and (most definitely) alive and occasionally kicking. Though of course being small makes it all the easier to be lifted up - first and foremost into the often sublime, gorgeous, intricate, and endlessly compelling regions of the poetry itself. And so it is that I feel myself at once honored and humbled -moved and made uncomfortable- by the gathering here in La corónica, and by the fact that it was convened by Ross Brann, whose marvelously nuanced studies have been a kind of beacon to me from the start of my engagement with the Hebrew poetry of Spain, as their sophistication compels rather than calls into question the possibility of belief in the worth of the literature he is treating.

Humbled and honored that a scholar and writer like María Rosa Menocal would pour out an alphabet of brimming associations that cut to the core of what I have been trying to do -and I emphasize the aspiration- in the various modes of my work. María's own ebullient, inventive, and fearless writing has played a vital and catalyzing role in the development of that larger project, and yet so much has happened, so much has been learned and unlearned, that it is hard now to conjure the quality of the shock I felt on first finding on a library shelf her Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage some twenty years ago. I had never heard of either her or that book, but there, flying off the page, was a vision of a transformative order that dovetailed in uncanny ways with my own incipient sense of how best to approach the literatures of Andalus. She was coming at it historically and philologically; I was coming at it aesthetically and prosodically. But the enterprise was, at heart, shared - the desire to bring an occluded literature or dimension of a given literature into the present in vital fashion. María's impassioned tack has been sustained and developed magisterially along the remarkable arc of her career and subsequent publications, which transport readers across borders of language, culture, social register, genre and artistic medium. That my initial encounter with her books has blossomed into a powerfully flowing friendship and ongoing conversation is one of the great joys of my life and it is a central source of nourishment for me. Happy is the poet who is part of her vision.

And happy is he...