ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTENSIVE WORK on this volume was made possible by a 2003 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, to which I remain deeply grateful. The PEN-America Translation Fund provided additional support, and I would like to thank all involved in awarding that grant. For support of previous volumes from which poems have been drawn for this anthology, thanks are due to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Marie Syrkin Foundation. I am especially grateful to Princeton University Press, which has provided an ideal home for my collections of medieval Hebrew poetry, and to its staff, which has been gracious and welcoming from the start.

Numerous individuals have in one way or another contributed to the making of this anthology—and while it goes without saying that all choices and errors in what follows are mine, it is a pleasure and honor to thank, first and foremost, the scholars of medieval Hebrew literature and history who have given generously of their time and knowledge as they answered my many questions about the poetry of the five centuries covered in this volume. Above all I am indebted to Matti Huss of the Hebrew University, who—over the course of countless hours, and through his own exemplary scholarship—patiently brought me into the inner workings of the medieval poem and showed me how to approach problems at every level of interpretation. For their ongoing support and their work in the field, I am beholden to Ross Brann, Devorah Bregman, Mark Cohen, Andras Hamori, Moshe Idel, Ira Lapidus, María Rosa Menocal, Haviva Pedaya, Raymond Scheindlin, Jacques Schlanger, Michael Sells, David Wasserstein, Steven Wasserstrom, and Yosef Yahalom. Aurelio Major and Salvador Andrés-Ordax provided critical assistance at one important (Spanish) juncture, and Jeremy Zwelling (Wesleyan University) and Robert Schine (Middlebury College) have supported my teaching of this material at their institutions; my thanks go out to them as well. For all he has written, and what he has said, I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to Eliot Weinberger. Special thanks are due to Gabriel Levin for years of discussion of this poetry (out of which these translations first emerged), and for the attention he lavished on this book in manuscript. Martin Earl and Michael Weingrad read the manuscript with characteristic acuity and were helpful in the extreme. Forrest Gander, Eli Gottlieb, and numerous other writers, translators, editors, and friends—Esther Allen, Rachel Tzvia Back, Robert Cohen, Tom Cole, Aminadav Dykman, Barbara Epler, Nomi Goldberg, Michal Govrin, Barry Goldensohn, Martin Guttmann, Yahya Hijazi, Edward Hirsch, Moshe Idel, Mark Kamine, Shirley Kaufman, Meir Mazar, Bradford Morrow, Gidi Nevo, Ruth Nevo, Phillip Lopate, Stephen O’Shea, Harold Schimmel, Aharon Shabtai, David Shapiro, Richard Sieburth, Sasson Somekh, and Leon Wieseltier—have in various ways encouraged this work for many years now. Their company is everywhere in these margins and between these lines. And finally, this book and my two previous volumes of translations of medieval Hebrew poetry from Spain would not exist in the form they do were it not for the sustained generosity and selfless encouragement of John Hollander, Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, and Lockert Library editor Richard Howard. My heartfelt thanks to all.