None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, a civilization decided to throw a party on the Iberian Peninsula, and the guest list included Jews, Muslims, and Christians in an arrangement so improbable that posterity christened it "convivencia," which is Spanish for "everyone eventually stops getting along." Peter Cole's "The Dream of the Poem" is the crash course in what those five centuries of coexistence, persecution, exile, and fitful genius produced. A corpus of Hebrew verse so unexpected, so charged with Arabic meters and biblical vocabulary, that the great historian S. D. Goitein required three words to describe it. "The Spanish miracle" was his verdict.
A Moroccan poet named Dunash Ben Labrat hauled the new prosody west from Baghdad to Cordoba in a trunk of revolutionary poetic strategies, was accused of destroying the holy tongue, displaced the reigning court poet, and then left town under obscure circumstances, abandoning a wife whose single surviving poem asks whether her husband would accept half a kingdom to stay in Spain.
He would not, and the tradition he ignited burned on without him.
Shmuel HaNagid wrote war poems from actual battlefields and wine poems from actual gardens, sometimes within the same week.
Shelomo Ibn Gabirol declared himself prince to the poem at the tender age of sixteen and proceeded to treat God as his most demanding patron.
Moshe Ibn Ezra spent the second half of his life in the Christian north, lamenting the Andalusian refinement he had lost, composing lyrics of immaculate bittersweet melancholy.
Yehuda HaLevi longed so publicly for Zion that his erotic verse and his theological yearning became, in Cole's translations, two registers of the same relentless desire.
Avraham Ibn Ezra wore a cloak with so many holes he could see Orion through it and wrote chess poems, fly poems, and patron-complaint poems.
Cole gathers fifty-four poets across two periods, Muslim Spain and Christian Spain, with a detour through Provence, and the anthology's arc follows the slow southward dimming of the Umayyad caliphate and the long, grinding northward migration of the Jews who survived it.
Almohad invasions scatter the Golden Age's inheritors. Inquisition pressures reshape the poetry of the Christian centuries. Todros Abulafia writes from a Castilian prison. Shelomo Bonafed catalogs a world gone wrong. The Expulsion of 1492 waits at the anthology's edge, and the poems up to that threshold carry the full weight of what was about to be lost, in a language the poets had bent, at enormous cost, into something wholly their own.
Five centuries of Hebrew verse in Iberia represent a genuine miracle of cultural cross-pollination, in which Jewish poets absorbed Neoplatonic philosophy, and the erotic conventions of Bedouin verse, then grafted all of it onto biblical Hebrew to produce something that belonged fully to two civilizations and exclusively to one. The miracle was also a paradox. To find their most original voice, these poets had to risk losing it entirely to the foreign.
Let man remember throughout his life
he’s on his way toward death:
each day he travels only a little
so thinks he’s always at rest—
like someone sitting at ease on a ship
while the wind sweeps it over the depths.
-Ibn Ezra
My hips hurt so much, I fear,
that I can neither see nor hear.
The pain today was the worst I’ve known—
like a woman’s giving birth on stones.
As Scripture, O my Lord, enjoins:
“Sigh for the breaking of my loins.”
-Shelomo Depiera
They contend against me for having abandoned the Lord’s covenant for godless injustice
— but Amram’s son in anger destroyed the Law’s tablets in his disgust.
And the Lion, Judah, went to Tamar,
and Amnon to his sister, a virgin;
and David was tried by the Lord and erred beside Bathsheba,
Like Delilah’s Samson.
I never tasted impure food, I always thought it a rotting carcass—
and if I tell you, “The Prophet’s mad,” but acknowledge him with every blessing,
my mouth speaks, but my heart replies:
“You’re lying again, and bearing false witness.”
I’ve sought the shadow of the Presence’s wing
and ask of you now, my Lord, forgiveness.
-Yitzhaq Ibn Ezra
❤️ 🇮🇱
Somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, a civilization decided to throw a party on the Iberian Peninsula, and the guest list included Jews, Muslims, and Christians in an arrangement so improbable that posterity christened it "convivencia," which is Spanish for "everyone eventually stops getting along." Peter Cole's "The Dream of the Poem" is the crash course in what those five centuries of coexistence, persecution, exile, and fitful genius produced. A corpus of Hebrew verse so unexpected, so charged with Arabic meters and biblical vocabulary, that the great historian S. D. Goitein required three words to describe it. "The Spanish miracle" was his verdict.
A Moroccan poet named Dunash Ben Labrat hauled the new prosody west from Baghdad to Cordoba in a trunk of revolutionary poetic strategies, was accused of destroying the holy tongue, displaced the reigning court poet, and then left town under obscure circumstances, abandoning a wife whose single surviving poem asks whether her husband would accept half a kingdom to stay in Spain.
He would not, and the tradition he ignited burned on without him.
Shmuel HaNagid wrote war poems from actual battlefields and wine poems from actual gardens, sometimes within the same week.
Shelomo Ibn Gabirol declared himself prince to the poem at the tender age of sixteen and proceeded to treat God as his most demanding patron.
Moshe Ibn Ezra spent the second half of his life in the Christian north, lamenting the Andalusian refinement he had lost, composing lyrics of immaculate bittersweet melancholy.
Yehuda HaLevi longed so publicly for Zion that his erotic verse and his theological yearning became, in Cole's translations, two registers of the same relentless desire.
Avraham Ibn Ezra wore a cloak with so many holes he could see Orion through it and wrote chess poems, fly poems, and patron-complaint poems.
Cole gathers fifty-four poets across two periods, Muslim Spain and Christian Spain, with a detour through Provence, and the anthology's arc follows the slow southward dimming of the Umayyad caliphate and the long, grinding northward migration of the Jews who survived it.
Almohad invasions scatter the Golden Age's inheritors. Inquisition pressures reshape the poetry of the Christian centuries. Todros Abulafia writes from a Castilian prison. Shelomo Bonafed catalogs a world gone wrong. The Expulsion of 1492 waits at the anthology's edge, and the poems up to that threshold carry the full weight of what was about to be lost, in a language the poets had bent, at enormous cost, into something wholly their own.
Five centuries of Hebrew verse in Iberia represent a genuine miracle of cultural cross-pollination, in which Jewish poets absorbed Neoplatonic philosophy, and the erotic conventions of Bedouin verse, then grafted all of it onto biblical Hebrew to produce something that belonged fully to two civilizations and exclusively to one. The miracle was also a paradox. To find their most original voice, these poets had to risk losing it entirely to the foreign.
Let man remember throughout his life
he’s on his way toward death:
each day he travels only a little
so thinks he’s always at rest—
like someone sitting at ease on a ship
while the wind sweeps it over the depths.
-Ibn Ezra
My hips hurt so much, I fear,
that I can neither see nor hear.
The pain today was the worst I’ve known—
like a woman’s giving birth on stones.
As Scripture, O my Lord, enjoins:
“Sigh for the breaking of my loins.”
-Shelomo Depiera
They contend against me for having abandoned the Lord’s covenant for godless injustice
— but Amram’s son in anger destroyed the Law’s tablets in his disgust.
And the Lion, Judah, went to Tamar,
and Amnon to his sister, a virgin;
and David was tried by the Lord and erred beside Bathsheba,
Like Delilah’s Samson.
I never tasted impure food, I always thought it a rotting carcass—
and if I tell you, “The Prophet’s mad,” but acknowledge him with every blessing,
my mouth speaks, but my heart replies:
“You’re lying again, and bearing false witness.”
I’ve sought the shadow of the Presence’s wing
and ask of you now, my Lord, forgiveness.
-Yitzhaq Ibn Ezra
❤️ 🇮🇱