PETER COLE

PHOTO BY CAROL ISAAK

Cole illuminates golden epoch of Hebrew poetry

By Paul Haist

Portland State University Judaic Studies Director Michael Weingrad might have raised a few eyebrows when he introduced the distinguished MacArthur Fellow Peter Cole with a reference to “jasmine and piss.”
   

It was a literary reference, and Cole himself would echo the theme later in his remarks, so it must have been OK. Almost everyone laughed.
   
MacArthur Fellows are those who have received what is widely known as a “Genius Grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
   
Cole was in Portland Oct. 14 as the leadoff speaker in this year’s Writers and Scholars lecture series sponsored by the Northwest Institute for Judaic Studies and the PSU Middle Eastern Studies Center.
   
Weingrad made the momentarily startling reference while citing a prose poem by Cole about Jerusalem, a work in which the redolent phrase appears with an order of poetic plangency that makes it just the right combination of words in the right place.
   
Cole is a widely admired translator of medieval Hebrew poetry and the translator and editor of the much acclaimed “The Dream of the Poem, Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492,” published this year by the Princeton University Press. The book includes, depending on how one counts, at least 373 poems by 54 poets.
   
Weingrad called Cole “the foremost translator of medieval poetry, ever.”
   
Cole’s remarks at PSU’s Hoffman Hall summarized in only the broadest strokes the startling transformation and subsequent evolution of Hebrew poetry on the Iberian Peninsula from the 10th century to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
   
Cole returned to the subject of bodily waste when he read his translation of a four-line poem by the 12th-century Spanish Jew Yosef Qimhi, who—as translated by Cole—sounds amazingly like Dorothy Parker. Cole calls the little poem “Consider This.”

The reference is emblematic of a distinguishing characteristic of Hebrew poetry from the Iberian Peninsula from the 10th century on that Cole said arose in the middle of that century with the appearance of the Hebrew poet Dunash Ben Labrat. What Dunash did appears to have set Hebrew poets free.

Dunash, said Cole, introduced to Hebrew poetry the metrics of the dominant Arabic poetry of the era and region, and opened the door to subjects that had not previously appeared in Andalusian Hebrew poetry.
   
While Dunash was accused at the time—in phrases quoted by Cole—of “destroying the holy tongue …by casting it into foreign meter,” and bringing “calamity on his peoples,” the door that had been opened would not be closed.
   
“Reports are that this new way of writing poetry spread like wildfire,” said Cole. “Dunash and the new school of Andalusian poetry took over and lasted for 500 years,” what is now called the Golden Age of Hebrew Poetry in Iberia.
   
As noted, it was more than an issue of Arabic rhythm and cadence that characterized that golden age.
   
Suddenly, according to Cole, “Hebrew poets were writing with tremendous power about a wide range of subjects including wine, war, friendship, erotic longing, wisdom, fate, grief, and both metaphysical and religious mystery.”
   
He contrasted this with the nearly 1,000 previous years of Hebrew literature in Andalusia, which he has characterized as “almost exclusively liturgical and ingrown poetic activity.”
   
Holding up Qimhi’s short poem about pride as an example of the Golden Age of Andalusian Hebrew poetry might be on the order of holding up Dorothy Parker as broadly representative of 20th-century American poetry. There might some truth in it, but Parker, like Dunash, was but a grain of sand in a vast expanse. There is vastly more that needs to be said.
   
Similarly, Cole barely had time to summarize how the metamorphosis in Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain came about, never mind all the great poetry and poets that comprise the legacy of that epoch.
   
His book, which sold briskly at the conclusion of his remarks, details that legacy.
   
In the extensive introduction to his book, Cole attributes to the Andalusion Hebrew poets the creation of “one of the most powerful languages of Jewish expression (that) postbiblical literature has known.”