GLOSSARY
The following notes relate only to terms mentioned in this anthology and are by no means exhaustive. Likewise, poems cited at the end of each entry illustrate the term under discussion but do not account for all the poems in this volume that demonstrate a given phenomenon.*
acrostic: While the vast majority of liturgical poems were written to be presented on behalf of a congregation of worshipers, and not as the personal expression of the individual poet, poets regularly “signed” their hymns with acrostics registering their names. Usually these acrostics ran down the spine of the poem, with the first letter of each line spelling out the poet’s name. Sometimes the acrostic would include only the poet’s first name, while at other times the full name in a variety of permutations would appear. Alternatively, particularly in longer composite poems, the poets employed alphabetical acrostics in a variety of (sometimes quite elaborate) arrangements.
adab: A central term in classical Arabic—and, by extension, Hebrew—literature, adab connotes both learning in its fullness as a way of life and the signature style of the cultured person. It refers at once to disciplines of the mind and soul, good breeding, refinement, culture, and belles lettres. Similar to the Greek notion of paideia.
ahava: A piyyut, or liturgical poem, that was originally part of the yotzer, a longer sequence of liturgical poems composed to accompany the recitation of the Shema‘ during the morning liturgy on Sabbaths and festivals. (Yotzer means “Creator” or “He who creates,” as in the first benediction leading up to the recitation of the Shema‘: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Creator of the heavenly lights.”) In Spain, it appears that the yotzer broke apart and its units became independent genres. The ahava was recited before the second benediction anticipating the Shema‘: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who in love (be’ahava) hast chosen Thy people Israel.” Most of the Spanish ahavot are strophic, rather than monorhymed, and they often incorporate elements from the Song of Songs. See Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “Gold” and HaLevi’s “A Doe Far from Home.”
badii‘a: An Arabic word that initially meant “something novel, original,” but came to stand for a style of poetry. It derives from the root yielding, among many other things, the verb abda‘a (to invent, to bring something new into creation) and one of the Islamic names for God, the Originator. In the history of Arabic literature, badii‘a denotes the “new” poetry of the early Abbasid period (late eighth–early ninth century), one that employed more elaborate rhetorical figuration than did previous Arabic verse. In Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the Abbasid Age (Leiden 1991), Suzanne Stetkevych comments: “I would like to propose that badii‘a poetry be defined not merely as the occurrence of this particular type of rhetorical device but rather that the badii‘a style is first and foremost the intentional, conscious encoding of abstract meaning into metaphor. . . . The large number of . . . rhetorical devices in badii‘a poetry is not a mere proliferation due to infatuation . . . but rather the product of a constant and ineluctable awareness of the logical and etymological relationship between words, and the intention to express this awareness” (pp. 8, 30). As the term “metaphysical” was originally a pejorative in the history of English poetry, so the root b-d-‘a in Arabic yields the word for heresy (bid‘ah), and Arabic literary history records very mixed feelings about the modern poets’ inventiveness and break with tradition. Ibn Qutayba says that Muslim Ibn al-Waliid (d. 823) was the first Arab poet to employ the style, “the first to make meanings subtle and speech delicate” (Adonis, Arab Poetics, p. 50). Moshe Ibn Ezra referred to Ibn Gabirol as the first Hebrew poet to adopt the badii‘a approach. Elements of it, however, are central to much of the Hebrew poetry composed in Andalusia. See Ibn Gabirol’s “The Garden,” Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “A Shadow,” Ibn Hasdai’s “The Qasida,” and HaLevi’s “On Friendship and Time” and “Heart at Sea.”
baqasha: There are two kinds of baqashot (liturgical poems of petition for the forgiveness of sins). The first is a long, comprehensive composition in powerfully cadenced nonmetrical lines that often rhyme. The second type, which appears to be an Andalusian phenomenon, is a shorter or medium-length monorhymed poem that usually repeats the poem’s opening hemistich at the end. For the first type, see Ibn Gabirol’s Kingdom’s Crown; for the second, see Ibn Gabirol’s “Before My Being” and HaLevi’s “Lord, [All My Desire].”
complaint, poems of: The borders of this genre in Hebrew are not well defined. Generally speaking, poems of complaint are cast in the first person and reflect the poet’s specific circumstances. The poem might treat a patron, an enemy, a disappointing friend or family member, a community as a whole, or even Fate or Time itself—but the perspective will always be personal and limited to the speaker. Poems of complaint often combine elements and strategies from a number of other genres, such as invective, boasting, rebuke, description, contemplation, or wisdom, and so forth. See Ibn Gabirol’s “On Leaving Saragossa” (and “My Words Are Driven” in Cole, Selected Ibn Gabirol), Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “The Dove” and “Why Does Time Hound Me So,” Todros Abu-lafia’s poems from prison, and Avraham Ibn Ezra’s “A Cloak,” “Fortune’s Stars,” and “How It Is.”
contemplative verse (wisdom poetry): While Hebrew contemplative verse is in many ways modeled on the contemplative poetry of Arabic literature, the biblical tradition of wisdom literature in Hebrew also informs this genre, whose distinguishing feature is its universality. Other genres might treat a given moment (of a battle, at a party, in love, after a death), blending elements of the actual and the ideal, the personal and the conventional; but contemplative poems treat existence itself and speak from the perspective of Wisdom, which in this medieval scheme is suprapersonal and objective. Just as the biblical Book of Proverbs was used for instruction by Solomon the sage (who didn’t necessarily write the proverbs there), so too the contemplative verse of medieval Hebrew Spain presents not so much personal insight as “instructional materials for the cultivation of personal morality and practical wisdom” (R.B.Y. Scott, Proverbs, Anchor Bible, introduction). It involves, in other words, a body of knowledge that would help one in the situations of living. Their objectivity notwithstanding, however, contemplative poems sometimes incorporate explicitly personal elements, which serve as a concrete illustration of the universal conclusion to be drawn from them. See HaNagid’s “I Quartered the Troops for the Night,” “The Market,” and nearly all of his poems from Ben Mishle and Ben Qohelet (which make up the final third of the section devoted to him here), Ibn Gabirol’s “If You’d Live among Men” and “Heart’s Hollow,”Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “Ivory Palaces” and “The World,” Yedaya HaPenini’s “The World Is a Raging Sea,” and later selections from the proverbs of Qimhi, and Moshe Natan.
convivencia: A term coined by modern Spanish scholars to refer to the culture of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in both northern and southern Spain during the Middle Ages. The term itself means, literally, “dwelling together” and does not necessarily imply the sort of tolerance that we associate with coexistence today. Rather, as Thomas Glick writes, it “carries connotations of mutual interpenetration and creative influence, even as it also embraces the phenomena of mutual friction, rivalry, and suspicion.” While religious communities were entirely distinct, and while political power was almost never shared, the marketplace and arena of culture brought the various ethnic groups together in a variety of fruitful ways. Medieval coexistence in Spain referred, then, to “a field of interaction” that was based on a deep-seated ethnic hierarchy involving protected and second-class citizens. In Muslim Spain these protected citizens (or dhimmis) were Christian and Jewish; in Christian Spain they included tolerated but often oppressed Jews and, to a lesser extent, Muslims. In both cases the situation was volatile, and political change often brought with it serious danger to minority populations. At its best, the culture gave Jews greater religious, social, economic, and intellectual freedom than they knew in any other medieval (non-Muslim) society; at its worst, it led to heavy taxation and serious oppression. When the bottom fell out of it, forced conversion, emigration, and slaughter weren’t long in coming. Its limitations notwithstanding, convivencia has been described as the defining issue in the history of al-Andalus, and it resulted in a major renaissance of Arabic and Hebrew literature and learning, and in an early flowering of Spanish culture. See also note 70 to the introduction.
descriptive verse: Descriptive verse (wasf in Arabic) was one of the four categories of poetry that the medieval Arabic poet was expected to control—the other three being the boast (fakhr), the invective (hijaa’), and the elegy (marthiya). Probably deriving from the descriptions of the abandoned campsite and beloved in the ancient qasida’s erotic prelude, and of animals and landscape in the journey section, or rahiil, it evolved into a genre of its own in Abbasid Baghdad and later in Spain. The tradition in Arabic was highly developed, with poets often devoting entire collections to elaborate treatments of single subjects, such as hunting animals, kinds of flowers, and specific objects. The Hebrew tradition tended to confine itself to a few central courtly topics: the garden, wine, nature in its more cultivated state, writing, beautiful young women and men, palace architecture and atmosphere, and the like. The riddle, too, was considered a kind of descriptive poem. While one might initially be inclined to take the genre of wasf poetry lightly—since it involves “mere” description—in fact an argument could be made for seeing this genre as, in some instances, central to the poetry of the period. To take but one example: as the garden is the place where members of the court society meet, and where visual, verbal, and musical aspects of its arts are combined, so the descriptive verse of the garden poems embraces and often addresses all of these constituent elements of Jewish-Andalusian society. See HaNagid’s “Have You Heard How I Helped the Wise” (in Cole, Selected HaNagid), Ibn Gabirol’s “Winter with Its Ink,” “The Garden,” “The Field,” and (in Cole, Selected Ibn Gabirol) “The Palace,” Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “The Pen” and “A Shadow,” HaLevi’s “Four Riddles,” and Shelomo DePiera’s “Winter in Monzón.”
desire, poems of (or love poetry): The Hebrew term shirei hesheq (literally, poems of desire or love), like the Hebrew term for the gazelle (tzvi—see below), derives from an Arabic parallel and involves a case of loan translation and linguistic slippage: one of the Arabic words for “passion” or “love” is ‘ishq, and a change of the initial letter brought poets to the biblical Hebrew hesheq.
Sometimes considered a subset of the wine poem (since the object of desire is often the cupbearer), the Hebrew poem of desire could adopt a variety of approaches, from overtly and powerfully sensual description of the beloved and the scene of the encounter, to wholly idealized portrayals of a refined situation, to humorous accounts of frustration and failure in the pursuit of experience. Strict if subtle conventions are adhered to, and knowing them and their social context helps distinguish the poetry’s “purpose” and desired effect. The lover, for example, is usually miserable; the beloved is generally fickle and cruel; depictions of the beloved are stylized; and the poem implies no specific autobiographical experience (though neither does it rule any out). “It sometimes happens,” writes Moshe Ibn Ezra, “that a poet can write of love without ever having loved” (The Book of Discussion, 143a). (For more specific criteria, see Cole, Selected Ibn Gabirol, pp. 287–88.) And, indeed, these poems comprise less a record of sexual adventure than what Andras Hamori has called “a badge of sensibility.” As they celebrate a given moment and its qualities, the poems embody a sensitivity to beauty and a capacity for pleasure that are generalized (even polymorphous), and extend well beyond the confines of a given erotic situation. That said, they are at times powerfully sensual in every respect, and considerable controversy still surrounds the Hebrew poems of desire, particularly the homoerotic verse, with some scholars finding it impossible to square the explicit (homo)erotic atmosphere with the fact that the poets were ritually observant, learned Jews.
With regard to the question of homosexual experience and how it is that these pious Jews could possibly be “flouting” something so clearly prohibited by Scripture, the jury is still out. While we do not know whether any of the Jewish poets had homosexual experience, we do know that Andalusian court culture was not homophobic, and that homoerotic poems were both common and powerful. On the whole, the poems do not feel like the literary exercises some scholars make them out to be, and they might best be taken at face value—like the erotic poems of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman perhaps—with all the ambiguity that implies.
As the conventions of the poetry of desire, like wine poetry, were in the Arabic tradition adopted by the Sufis and subtly manipulated along religious lines, so too the Andalusian Hebrew poets brought the eroticism of secular poetry into the synagogue to create surprisingly (and at times stunningly) sensuous poems of devotion. Ibn Gabirol, Moshe Ibn Ezra, and HaLevi excelled at this sort of grafting.
See Ibn Khalfoun’s “Love in Me Stirs”; HaNagid’s “The Gazelle” and “In Fact I Love That Fawn”; Ibn Gabirol’s “You Lie in My Palace”; Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “Heart’s Desire,” “Gold,” and “The Gazelle’s Sigh”; HaLevi’s “That Day while I Had Him,” “A Doe Far from Home” and “Love’s Dwelling”; Yehuda Alharizi’s “Boys”; Todros Abulafia’s “I’ve Labored in Love,” “She Said She Wanted,” and “There’s Nothing Wrong in Wanting a Woman”; and Ibn Danaan’s erotic epigrams.
diwan: A gathering of a given poet’s poems, usually a “collected poems.” The word is Persian in origin, and means—among other things—register, or record, as in Ibn Khaldun’s famous pronouncement, “Poetry is the diwan of the Arabs,” i.e., their historical record, or archive. Some of the diwans were compiled by the poets themselves, but most were put together by later (or contemporary) copyists and amateur lovers of poetry. The poems were often prefaced with headings describing the circumstances of composition or the poem’s subject matter. The headings to the Hebrew Andalusian poems were always written in Judeo-Arabic; in Christian Spain, they were sometimes composed in Hebrew. Poems within the diwan were arranged either by chronology (to the extent that could be determined); alphabetically by their rhyme letter or the first word of the poem; by theme, genre, and meter; or in some cases by other, more complicated schemes. While the term diwan denoted a collection of secular verse, in fact most of the extant Hebrew diwans (in Arabic, dawawiin) contain some liturgical poems as well.
encomia (poetry of praise): According to Arabic tradition, it is possible to divide all of poetry and its genres into two overall categories: praise (madiih) and scorn (dhamm). Along this line of thinking, the elegy involves praise for the dead; the erotic poem praise of beauty (male or female); the descriptive poem praise of nature; the boast poem praise of self; the wine poem praise of wine and drinking; the contemplative or gnomic poem praise of wisdom; poems of friendship praise for a leader, patron, prominent figure, or friend; and so forth. Satire or invective would then involve disparagement of a particular person (or his attributes); the poem of complaint scorn for one’s own situation; poems of asceticism scorn for the world; and so on. Given the social circumstances of medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry alike, where the poet sometimes depended on support from patrons or the extended court environment, it was natural that encomia constituted a considerable percentage of a poet’s diwan. That said, many of the encomia are in fact poems addressed to friends rather than patrons, and celebrate either friendship itself or the qualities one admires in a peer—both potentially serious subjects for poetry. While there is a good deal of formulaic, panegyric verse among these poems of praise, the social occasion that called for them sometimes resulted in the composition of poems of true feeling and serious criticism (through subtle departure from accepted convention); sensuality (in the erotic prelude to the encomia); or meditation on value (elsewhere in the qasida—on which, see below). Not all encomia were odes; short poems of praise were written as well. On the whole, the poetry of praise should not be dismissed as a form of empty flattery (though it could be just that); it is rather what Julie Meisami describes as a complex literary vehicle for the presentation of cultural ideals. See Ibn Hasdai’s “The Qasida,” HaLevi’s “On Friendship and Time,” Al-harizi’s “A Poem No Patron Has Ever Heard,” and, in Cole, Selected Ibn Gabirol, “The Palace.”
epigram: Epigrams are extremely common in both Arabic and Hebrew medieval literature, and they need to be distinguished within the more general category of the qit‘a, or short poem. As in classical Greek, Latin, and English literature, the Hebrew epigram is characterized by brevity, wit, and its point, or strong sense of closure. In the Arabic tradition, longer qasidas were often “ransacked” by anthologists for epigrammatic lines that would stand on their own, and this anthology contains several of these “detached” epigrams (the source of which is always listed in the notes to the poem). Epigrams ranged widely in theme, but gnomic, satirical, elegiac, and erotic epigrams abound.
fakhr: Literally, “pride” (Arabic); as a literary term it indicates self-vaunting poetry or a boast. Though sometimes considered as a genre of Arabic poetry, it is in fact an attitude or mode that finds expression in a variety of ways. In the oral culture of pre-Islamic Arabia, the poet was not only the spokesman of his tribe but a shamanlike figure who possessed magical powers and could help determine the fate of his people, by instilling them with strength-yielding confidence and demoralizing the enemy. The qasida or ode was one of their primary forms of communication in this respect, and in the pre-Islamic context the boast formed one of that poem’s dominant elements, traditionally coming at the end of the three-part ode or in the body of the two-part ode. It was a common motif in subsequent Arabic and Andalusian Hebrew poetry as well. Originally the boast embodied either communal or personal virtues, especially those of muruuwwa (manliness), including generosity, heroism, fidelity, and self-control. While it is often hard for modern readers to relate to this self-satisfied or egoistical aspect of medieval Arabic and Hebrew work, it may help to see the boast poem on the one hand as a culture-bound vehicle for the transmission of value, and on the other as a Norman Mailer–like advertisement for oneself uttered in the highly competitive arena of literature—a literary analogue, perhaps, to the “trash talk” of contemporary athletes. Again, this element was less pronounced in the Hebrew poetry of the day than it was in the Arabic. See HaNagid’s “On Fleeing His City” and (in Cole, Selected HaNagid) “Have You Heard How I Helped the Wise,” and Ibn Gabirol’s “I’m Prince to the Poem,” “Truth Seekers Turn,” “On Leaving Saragossa,” “I Am the Man,” “Prologue to The Book of Grammar,” and (in Selected Ibn Gabirol) “The Palace” and “As the Roots of a Tree.”
gazelle: Poets used several Hebrew terms to represent the figure of the beloved, including tzvi (f., tzviyya), ‘ofer (f., ‘ofra), and ya‘alat hen (f.)—all of which can be translated variously as gazelle, hart, deer, fawn, hind, doe, roe, and more, depending on the circumstances of a given poem. The motif in Hebrew poetry evolved from both Song of Songs 2:9 (“Behold, my beloved is like a gazelle [tzvi] or a young hart [‘ofer ha’ayalim]”) and from the tradition of Arabic love poetry, which often likens the beloved to a gazelle (ghazaal or zabi—the Arabic cognate of the Hebrew tzvi). As the Arabic word for the desirable young man or woman is a near-cognate—sabi or sabiyya (f.) (the root of which, as a verb, means “to feel sensual desire for,” just as tzvi in Hebrew can also mean “beauty” or “glory” or “that which is desired”)—an interesting opportunity for loan translation presented itself. Erotic poetry in Arabic is in fact known as ghazal, which also involves another case of linguistic slippage. The word derives from the verb ghazala, to spin, but assumed the associations of the gazelle early on. At times the feminine form of the animal will be used to represent a masculine beloved, or vice versa; at other times, the pronoun is a reliable indication of the beloved’s gender. In the liturgical poetry the gazelle appears as an image of God (m.) or the congregation of Israel (f.). See Ibn Mar Sha’ul’s “A Fawn Sought in Spain,” HaNagid’s “The Gazelle,” Ibn Gabirol’s “You Lie in my Palace,” Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “The Gazelle’s Sigh,” Alharizi’s “Measure for Measure,” Todros Abulafia’s “She Said She Wanted,” and many other poems. For more on the subject of erotic poetry and homoeroticism, see DESIRE, POEMS OF.
genre: Genres play a prominent role in medieval Hebrew poetry, and knowledge of the available generic options is necessary for proper reading of the work and appreciation of the ways in which poets manipulated their materials and at times transcended the period’s conventions. Rather than viewing these conventions as impediments toward expression, one might first consider the ways in which generic assumptions and conventions live on and flourish in our own culture: in literature and drama (the fourth wall and the omniscient narrator); in rock and country songs (particularly about love); in films (through the sometimes contrived mechanisms propelling romantic comedies, murder mysteries, and road movies); in television shows, and elsewhere. As Paul Fussell has put it, “The notion that convention shows a lack of feeling, and that a poet attains ‘sincerity’ . . . by disregarding [convention], is opposed to all the facts of literary experience and history.” See individual entries for encomia, wine poetry, erotic verse, contemplative verse, and so on.
ge’ula: Literally, [a poem of] “redemption,” “salvation,” or “deliverance.” A liturgical poem that was originally part of the yotzer and treats Israel’s exile and hopes for salvation. The ge’ula was recited on Sabbaths and festivals before the final benediction after the recitation of the Shema‘: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Redeemer (go’el) of Israel.” In Spain, the ge’ulot were often strophic. See Ibn Ghiyyat’s “My Wandering” and HaLevi’s “If Only I Could Be.”
hijaa’: See INVECTIVE.
invective: One of the principle genres of Arabic poetry, invective (Arabic, hijaa’) is the inverse of the poetry of praise (see ENCOMIA, above). The Arabic word may originally have meant “casting a spell,” and like the English word “spell” it also means “to write out.” Both indicate a possible origin in magic, where the utterance of curses could destroy the honor of a person or tribe by articulating, and broadcasting, shameful attributes—sometimes as a prelude to, or substitute for, actual combat or violent confrontation. While the magical aspect of the enterprise eventually vanished, the destructive power of the utterance did not, and the Arabic and Hebrew medieval poets could be lethal in their verbal assaults. Hijaa’ verse assumes a variety of forms, but it is particularly acute when loaded into the epigram, or concealed in a longer qasida of praise, where it would have ambushed its off-balance victim. The invective might be directed at a person or an entire group of people (e.g., a religion). For all its ability to injure, however, the invective was also a source of amusement, humor, and—one assumes—catharsis. Again, the poem of invective was less common in Hebrew than it was in Arabic. See HaNagid’s “The Critique,” Ibn Gabirol’s “The Altar of Song,” Alharizi’s “A Miser in Mosul” and “Born to Baseness,” and Benveniste’s “The Tongue Speaks and the Hand Records.” Sometimes a single poem could be both a poem of praise and scorn: see, for example, Alharizi’s “Palindrome for a Patron.”
kharja: The final couplet of the secular muwashshah, usually written out in the Arabic or Romance vernacular (or in a combination of the two) and spoken by a young woman or a creature of the poet’s invention—such as a dove or the wind—from outside the masculine context of the poem, and sometimes outside its aristocratic environment. Kharjas were regularly drawn ready-made from Andalusian folk tradition, and the muwashshah would often be created around a given couplet from that tradition. In some instances they preserve the oldest known form of Spanish. The word itself is Arabic for “exit.” Not all Hebrew muwashshahat contained the kharja. See HaLevi’s “If Only I Could Give” and Todros Abulafia’s “I Take Delight in My Cup and Wine.”
line: The principal Hebrew line (bayit—literally, “house”; plural, batim) taken over from Arabic comprised two generally symmetrical hemistiches, known as the delet (door) and the sogair (latch, or lock). In Arabic these were known as the sadr (chest, front) and the ‘ajouz (backside or rump). Each of these was normally end-stopped, but enjambment across the first hemistich was not uncommon. In both the shorter qit‘a and the longer, polythematic qasida, the sogair, or second hemistich of each line, would maintain a single end-rhyme (monorhyme) throughout the length of the poem. It was also standard—but not required—for the opening hemistich (the initial delet) of the poem to rhyme with its sogair.
In printed editions of the poetry, and almost always in translation (particularly into an uninflected English, which is much less compact), the two parts of the line or bayit are sometimes printed on two separate lines.
The lines of the qasida and qit‘a alike were composed in one of the quantitative meters (and their variants) that were also adapted from Arabic prosody.
For other Hebrew forms of the line, see MUWASHSHAH and STROPHIC POEM, below.
maqaama: A rhymed-prose picaresque narrative that sometimes instructs as it entertains and is almost always interspersed with metrical poems illustrating developments in the story. It can tell a single continuous narrative or comprise a series of independent stories. The maqaama’s characters (who are usually given biblical names) include a narrator of solid social standing who wanders from place to place for business or pleasure and a restless, peripatetic protagonist who has fallen from grace and is now shameless in his quest for sustenance and personal gain. The protagonist also happens to be, by convention, a poet of remarkable gifts. The two men meet in nearly every chapter. The term maqaama is Arabic and implies a “place of assembly” or “public gathering,” as the stories were almost always recited in such a forum. See Ibn Tzaq-bel, Alharizi, Ibn Zabara, Ya‘aqov Ben Elazar, and others.
martial verse: The only martial verse in the postbiblical Hebrew canon is by Shmu’el HaNagid. HaNagid’s battle poems combine the Arabic tradition of muruuwwa (manhood or manliness) and the hamaasa (epic tradition) with sophisticated use of Hebrew biblical typologies. Often deriving his descriptions of a given battle from the tradition of Arabic martial verse, and mixing that with realia from the campaigns that he may himself have led (or administered), HaNagid then uses biblical elements to weave that compound into a full-fledged typological landscape. HaNagid himself, in that scheme, is seen as a David-like warrior-poet leading a kind of national renaissance, and his enemies (who were in fact the enemies of the Muslim Granadan army he led) become the incarnation of the ancient enemies of Israel. For all that, the poems are nonetheless highly personal. Several took the place of prayer on a given day, and some were written in commemoration of major Granadan victories, which are then elided into a triumph for the Jewish community as a whole. Other poems treat dream visions relating to battle. See HaNagid’s “On Lifting the Siege” and “The War with Yaddayir” in this anthology; there are numerous other battle poems in Cole, Selected HaNagid.
mehayyeh: Literally, “He who revives.” The mehayyeh is a liturgical poem that prefaces the second benediction of the central prayer of the Hebrew liturgy, the ‘amida (the standing prayer): “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting.” See Ibn Gabirol’s “Send Your Spirit.” The mehayyeh is the second part of the qedushta (a larger Eastern composition of liturgical poems composed to be performed around the first two blessings of the ‘amida and its qedusha, or sanctification of the Lord of hosts).
me’ora: Literally, “[a poem of] light.” Intended to ornament the first blessing leading up to the recitation of the Shema‘: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Creator of the heavenly lights.” The me’ora usually treats the relationship between God and the congregation of Israel, and expresses hope in the coming redemption. See Nahum’s “Winter Has Waned.” Part of the yotzer.
muharak: A liturgical poem that prefaces the nishmat kol hai prayer (“The breath of every living being shall bless Thy name, O Lord”). The muharak, which is recited before the prayer and after the reshut to the nishmat (see RESHUT), is strophic, and often deals with the nature and qualities of the soul. The term is Arabic and means “mover” or “one which moves”; it was most likely connected to the way in which the piyyut was originally sung and performed in the synagogue. See HaLevi’s “If Only I Could Be.”
mustajaab (or mustajiib): A kind of seliha (see below), the mustajaab is a common Spanish-Hebrew strophic form beginning with a biblical verse that subsequently serves as a refrain throughout the hymn. (The term itself is Arabic and means “response.”) The final lines of each strophe are also biblical and rhyme with the concluding word of the refrain. (Sometimes these rhyme words are identical.) See Ibn Gabirol’s “He Dwells Forever” and Moshe Ben Nahman’s “Before the World Ever Was.”
muwashshah: An Andalusian Arabic strophic form, apparently developed from Romance folk poetry and adopted in the eleventh century by the Hebrew poets. In Hebrew, as in Arabic, the poem weaves together two (often elaborate) rhyme schemes, and sometimes two metrical schemes as well. The secular muwashshah usually closes with a kharja (see above). The muwashshahat were sung, and one often senses in the written texts the absence of the musical accompaniment and its shifting rhythms. The term itself has, unfortunately, been translated into English as “girdle poem” (no doubt as in the older meaning of that word—“belt”). In fact, the Arabic verb washshaha means to adorn or dress, and the noun wushshaah is “an ornamented sash or belt—in older times a doubled band with embedded gems worn sash-like over the shoulder (H. Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written, Arabic [1961; London and Beirut, 1980], pp. 1070–71).” One might, then, best think of the muwashshah as a poem in which the rhyming chorus winds about the various strophes of the poem as a gem-studded sash cuts across the body. Generally speaking, the muwashshah was considered a “nonclassical” form, and it was initially looked down upon in the Arabic tradition; muwashshahat were not usually included in a poet’s diwan, and if they were, they were often relegated to the back of the manuscript and constituted a separate section. The earliest Arabic muwashshahat date from the end of the tenth century; in Hebrew the earliest extant muwashsha-hat are by Shmu’el HaNagid. The first liturgical muwashshahat are by Ibn Gabirol. In Hebrew, the muwashshah was absorbed more quickly into liturgical verse than it was into the secular dimension. For a telling example of the way in which this form could be adapted in Hebrew for either secular or liturgical use, see HaLevi’s “If Only I Could Give” and “If Only I Could Be.” Also Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “Heart’s Desire,” Ibn Tzaddiq’s “Lady of Grace,” and Todros Abulafia’s “I Take Delight in My Cup and Wine.”
nasiib: The first and usually nostalgic section of the qasida. In the classical Arabic qasida, the nasiib is erotic and always refers to a relationship in the past. The poet comes across the ruins or traces (atlaal) of an abandoned campsite (daar, manzil), which trigger a series of memories of the beloved’s beauty and the couple’s time together. The poet laments the loss of that richness, but regains his composure and vows to move on. Sometimes the nasiib incorporates a night vision of the beloved (khayaal, tayf ). Other motifs include the poet’s watching the beloved’s tribe prepare for departure. In the Hebrew qasida, as in the Arabic, the nasiib might be erotic (usually homoerotic), but at times it also faintly echoes the tradition of the abandoned campsite and embodies the theme of separation in any number of subtle ways. Transition from the nasiib to the body of the Hebrew poem is effected by means of the takhallus (literally, the “extrication” or “release”), a verse that tested the poet’s skill and agility. See Yosef Ibn Hasdai’s “The Qasida” and HaLevi’s “To Ibn alMu‘allim.”
ne‘ila: A penitential poem accompanying the fifth and final prayer session on the Day of Atonement. The Hebrew term means “closing,” and the ne‘ila is recited toward sundown, as the gates of heaven—which have been open during the festival—are shut until the following year. See Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “At the Hour of Closing.”
nishmat: See RESHUT.
ofan: The ofan is a section of the yotzer accompanying the part of the prayer service known as the qedusha (sanctification); it is recited between the qedusha’s two verses: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory” (Isaiah 6:3) and “Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His heavenly abode” (Ezekiel 3:12). The Hebrew term refers to the type of angels mentioned in the prayer that links these two verses: “And the celestial beings (ofanim) of the heavenly chariot, with great stirring, rise toward the seraphim and all together they respond with praise.” The ofan tends to reflect that celestial “stirring” in its percussive cadence and dense, often alliterative weave. Generally speaking, it describes the holiness of the heavenly beings and their work. See Ibn Gabirol’s “Angels Amassing” and HaSniri’s “The Worship of Wood and a Fool.”
ornament: A wide variety of rhetorical figures taken from Arabic poetry were employed in the composition of Hebrew verse, and numerous parallels to them can be found in Greek and Latin rhetoric. A very short list of important Hebrew and Arabic ornaments would include shibbutz or iqtibaas (quotation or inlay), tajniis (paronomasia, or word play of numerous sorts), haqbalat hafakhim or mutaabaqa (antithesis), mubaalagha (hyperbole), mubaalagha maqbuula (acceptable hyperbole), istitraad (digression), isti‘aara (metaphor), hitamemut (feigned ignorance), and husn al-ta‘aliil (fantastic etiology, or finding an interesting fictitious cause for a fact in reality). The categories of rhetorical figures are often extremely detailed and involve subtle distinctions between the varieties of figuration. Far from constituting a rote, prettifying application to an otherwise useful but plain facade, biblical inlay and the other ornaments of this poetry serve to highlight a given aspect of the verse by focusing attention on it and intensifying emphasis and effect. In a sense, the ornaments act like tiny turbines to the current of the verse, thousands of finely constructed stations-of-power set out along its flow.
personal poem: It is often hard for modern readers to understand the difference in the medieval context between “individuality” and “the personal” in poetry. While the Arabic and Hebrew traditions provided poets with a fixed set of genres and a host of conventions that they were expected to employ, the expression of individuality in verse was by no means ruled out. On the contrary, the conventions challenged the poet to place his stamp on the composition of the verse and the employment of the genres. While the poet’s individuality does not necessarily manifest itself through “confession” or registration of the “personal” experience of which modern readers are so enamored, there is a good deal more of the personal in this verse than has often been acknowledged (see introduction, note 61), and poets often worked their own experience into the conventional parameters. Beyond that, some of their best poems involve the creation of a sui generis poetic mode, which scholars now refer to as the “personal poem.” These poems treat singular and ephemeral, as opposed to the conventional, idealized, or essentialized situations of the classical genres. They detail the chronological, biographical, or experiential uniqueness of a given moment. And just as personal formulations and even personal experience might be worked into the conventional genres, so too conventional or idealized or general elements could be woven into the registration of the personal. See HaNagid’s “On Lifting the Siege,” Ibn Gabirol’s “I Am the Man,” Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “The Dove” and “Why Does Time Hound Me So,” HaLevi’s sea poems, and Avraham Ibn Ezra’s “A Cloak,” “The Flies,” and “The Wedding Night.”
pizmon: The term itself means “refrain” and can refer to a wide variety of liturgical poems. In Spain, pizmonim tended to be strophic poems of an archaic cast with an introductory verse and refrain. See Ibn Avitor’s “Hymn for the New Year.” Refrains can also be found in Ibn Gabirol’s “He Dwells Forever,” Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “At the Hour of Closing,” and Nahmanides’ “Before the World Ever Was.”
piyyut: A liturgical poem. Both medieval and modern editions of medieval Hebrew poetry distinguish between shirei hol and shirei qodesh, that is, secular poems and sacred poems. In practice, however, the term shirei qodesh, and by implication piyyut, indicate poems written for incorporation into the liturgy. The term “secular poem” in this context simply means a poem for a nonliturgical setting: it may still involve religious and devotional concerns, without being a piyyut. The poet who composes piyyutim is called a paytan—both words deriving from the Greek poietes (maker).
qasida: An Arabic term indicating an ode, technically a polythematic poem of a certain length (in Hebrew, up to 149 lines) and written in monorhyme with a single classical quantitative meter. The qasida was developed by the fifth-century pre-Islamic Bedouin poets, who usually divided the ode into three overall parts (with many variable subdivisions): the nasiib (erotic prelude, which often included a “weeping over the abandoned campsite,” or atlaal), the rahiil ( journey across the desert, which included extensive description of the landscape’s flora and fauna), and the madiih (encomium, or poem of praise, which often included a boast of some sort, advancing the values of the tribe or individual). Their respective themes might be summed up as “loss and longing,” “setting out,” and “celebration” or “condemnation.” The term qasida is Arabic and derives, it seems, from the verb meaning “to intend” or “to aim.” (Others feel that it refers to one of the ancient quantitative meters, which—like all the quantitative meters—early on were deployed in the two-part line, the distich, with monorhyme.) This intention—which came to expression in the encomium—could range widely from the tribal to the personal, but almost always involved the embodiment and presentation of critical cultural value. The seven great odes of the pre-Islamic tradition are known as the Mu‘allaqat (the “hanging odes”), as legend, possibly grounded in historic fact, has it that they were hung on curtains draped over the pagan shrine of the Qa‘aba (the Black Stone) at Mecca—a practice indicative of the central role that poetry has played in Arab society. In later Islamic periods and the courtly urban environments of Abbasid Baghdad, the qasida evolved in a variety of ways, gradually losing its central section (the rahiil) and taking on a bipartite form: nasiib and madiih (prelude and praise—with the praise often being followed by a request or message of some sort). In some poems, the erotic prelude was replaced by other subjects, and the encomium by its inverse: lampoon or invective (hijaa’). The Hebrew poets took up these developments and for the most part composed bipartite qasidas, though echoes of the three-part qasida can also be detected in certain instances (see, for instance, HaNagid’s “On Fleeing His City”). In the two-part qasida the nasiib is—if all goes well—gracefully joined to the body of the poem by means of the takhal-lus (literally, the “extrication,” i.e., transition), which, as it employs any number of possible rhetorical strategies, often mentions the name of the person being praised (in an encomium) and somehow links the parts thematically or in associative fashion. For a classic two-part qasida employing many of the Arabic motifs and figures, see Ibn Hasdai’s “The Qasida.” All the longer, non-strophic poems in this book are qasidas, though these long poems are sometimes broken down in translation into manageable English stanzas.
qina (for the Ninth of Av): There are two kinds of qinot in medieval Hebrew poetry. The first is a liturgical poem for the Ninth of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Liturgical poems of this sort were intended for recitation as part of the morning qerova, specifically, the part that ornaments the fourteenth benediction of the ‘amida on festivals (“Blessed art Thou, O Lord, [consoler of Zion], the builder of Jerusalem”), or on the evening of the holiday and the holiday itself.
qina (elegy): The second type of qina was simply a poem for the dead, an elegy (marthiya in the Arabic tradition), which could be deeply personal, written on commission, or provided for a member of the congregation. Qinot were also written for entire (destroyed) communities. Hebrew qinot (for the dead) go back to the Bible, the Talmud, and Eastern Jewish poetry. In Spain they developed as a secular subgenre modeled after monorhymed Arabic elegies, though in some cases (when they related to communities) they were later incorporated into the liturgy, for the Ninth of Av in particular. The Jewish poets also wrote strophic qinot, incorporating biblical elements, that mention the name of the deceased in the final line of each stanza. See Ibn Avitur’s “Lament for the Jews of Zion,” HaNagid’s “On the Death of Isaac, His Brother,” Ibn Gabirol’s “See the Sun,” HaLevi’s “Won’t You Ask, Zion,” and Avraham Ibn Ezra’s “Lament for Andalusian Jewry” and “Elegy for a Son.”
qit‘a: A short poem in the Arabic tradition, up to ten lines (twenty in English), treating a range of secular genres and themes. The qit‘a (which means “fragment,” or “piece”) was for a long time thought to have “broken off ” a larger composition (the qasida), but scholars now believe that they were also written as discrete, monothematic poems.
rehuta: An unrhymed seliha (penitential poem). The term itself derives from the root meaning “quick” or “smooth,” as the poems are read rapidly and without any breaks or refrains. They also employ numerous scriptural references. Later poets imitated this form, which appears to have been introduced by Avraham Ibn Ezra. See his “I Bow Down” and Avraham Ben Shmu’el’s “To Whom among the Avengers of Blood.”
reshut: Originally a poetic prelude in which the paytan asked “permission” (reshut) from God and the congregation to recite a poem as part of the liturgy. In Spain the term indicated a short poem recited before part of the standard liturgy or before the Sabbath or festival prayer service as a whole. The reshuyot (plural) often employed the Arabized forms and motifs of secular poems and allowed for the individual expression of the paytan before the congregation and not simply in its name. As such, it stood in sharp contrast to the Eastern tradition of liturgical poetry and, not surprisingly, gave rise to some of the finest Spanish-Hebrew poems of devotion. Reshuyot to the nishmat kol hai prayer (“The breath of every living being shall bless Thy name, O Lord”) were particularly popular and accomplished among the Spanish poets, though other liturgical stations were also ornamented with reshuyot. See Ibn Gabirol’s “I Look for You,” “Open the Gate,” “The Hour of Song,” and more; also Levi Ibn Altabbaan’s “Utter His Oneness,” HaLevi’s “The Morning Stars” and “You Knew Me,” Avraham Ibn Ezra’s “Sent Out from the Glory” and “I Call to Him,” and Shelomo DePiera’s “Tabernacles: A Prayer.”
saj‘: A term that is usually, if inadequately, translated as “rhymed prose,” or “rhymed, rhythmic prose.” Essentially belletristic, or formal, it is distinguished in the Arabic tradition from ordinary, unadorned prose. Saj‘ was used by pre-Islamic soothsayers for their oracular statements and incantations, and it is also employed extensively in the Quran. (See Michael Sells, Approaching the Qur’án [Ashland, 1999], for more on the way in which the “prose” of the Quran functions as poetry.) The Arabic word itself derives from the verb meaning “to coo,” and evokes, as the lexicographer E. W. Lane illustrates it, “a pigeon continuing its cry uninterruptedly in one uniform way or manner . . . cooing and prolonging its voice.” The origins of Hebrew saj‘ can be traced to classical liturgical poetry from the East (from the sixth century on) and to rhymed epistolary prose, which emerges in the early tenth century. Ibn Gabirol’s masterpiece, Kingdom’s Crown, is also composed in saj‘. While in early eleventh-century Hebrew the form was most often reserved for epistolary writing, in Ibn Gabirol’s hands the saj‘ is much closer to a kind of pulsing, symphonic free verse. All the Arabic and Hebrew maqaamas are written in saj‘, where it becomes a vehicle of entertaining and often humorous narrative. For more on the topic, see Cole, Selected Ibn Gabirol, pp. 289–90, and in this anthology, the selections from Ibn Gabirol’s Kingdom’s Crown and Qalonymos Ben Qalonymos’ “On Becoming a Woman.”
seliha: A general term describing poems written for fast days and days of penitence, especially those between the New Year and the Day of Atonement. The Hebrew term means “pardon” or “forgiveness” (i.e., a poem asking for forgiveness), and this overarching genre treats numerous subjects and includes a variety of subgenres, such as the tokheha, vidu’i, qina, baqasha, mustajaab, and more. The Spanish-Hebrew poets also composed some lyrical selihot of a personal rather than communal cast. See Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “The Day to Come,” Avraham Ibn Ezra’s “Blessèd Is He Who Fears,” “To the Soul,” and “Children of Exile,” HaLevi’s “A Dove in the Distance,” and Moshe Ben Nahman’s “Before the World Ever Was.”
shibbutz: The shibbutz—the use of recognizable scriptural verses or fragments of verses in poems—is one of the more well-known ornaments in medieval Hebrew literature. It consists of at least three biblical words, not necessarily in the order in which they appear in Scripture, and can take several forms. The “neutral shibbutz” (by far the most common kind) employs scriptural elements but does not consciously involve the original context of the biblical phrase or substantially affect the interpretation of the poem. (“Neutral” here is a relative term; the fact that the words are drawn from Scripture lends them, from the start, a valence and prestige that are anything but “neutral.”) “Charged shib-butzim” use implants that deliberately play off the original context of the scriptural fragment, adding substantially if subtly to the associative field of the poem. This kind of shibbutz was employed in a wide variety of ways and its effect ranged widely. It might convey information essential to our understanding of the poem as a whole and our appreciation of its beauty, or merely pertain to a certain aspect of the poem; and it could use the scriptural verse in ironic or wholly irreverent fashion, or radically alter its meaning. And finally, full-fledged biblical allusion acts like any literary allusion to a classical text. While implants of this sort were employed in earlier Hebrew verse, their role was enhanced with the Andalusian Jewish poets’ return to a pure biblical diction, and the possibilities that shibbutzim offered for the subtle shading of meaning—and for surprise—were exploited. That said, the shibbutz should not, for the most part, be treated as a “key” to the poem’s meaning.
The term itself is somewhat misleading and in fact reflects a development in nineteenth-century German scholarship (where it was known as mussivstil). The Hebrew term shibbutz means “setting” or “inlay,” as in the craft of the jeweler or mosaicist, and relies on a metaphor that misses the dynamic action of the scriptural force in the poem. Like most of the rhetorical ornaments of this poetry, the use of scriptural fragments in the weave of the verse was, in part, brought over from Arabic literature, where it was based on the Quran and was known as iqtibaas, “the lighting of one flame from another.” Far from implying a static effect, it suggested a source of power and transfer of energy. That effect, however, is usually local and has been described as lights flashing on and off for different periods of time and at different levels of strength and intensity.
Another compelling explanation of this rhetorical device is offered by Neal Kozodoy: “We might think of the poem,” he writes, “as a garment woven with great skill from costly and colorful material. Into this fabric have been twined threads of pure gold, beaten down from a single golden bar, the Bible; . . . [These threads] call attention to themselves, first, inviting us to hold up the work, tilting it at a variety of angles and planes in an attempt to perceive whether they might not form some hidden pattern. At the same time, they impart real depth and brilliance to the surfaces surrounding them, and as we study those surfaces we become struck by the impression of motion, as the presence of the pure gold subtly alters the values and intensities of the surrounding hues.”
strophic poem: A poem that employs rhymed strophes rather than the bipartite, monorhymed line of the qasida and the qit‘a. Among the forms of strophic poetry in Hebrew are the shir me‘ain eizori or shir me‘ain eizor (semimuwashshah) and the muwashshah. In fact, the Hebrew strophic poems may have evolved from an entirely separate Hebrew tradition, which existed in the East prior to the development of the Arabic muwashshah in Andalusia. The strophic poem can employ a wide variety of stanzaic structures and rhyme schemes, including a refrain, and might be written in syllabic or quantitative meter, or with no meter at all. See Ibn Gabirol’s “He Dwells Forever.”
tokheha: Literally, “admonition.” A subgenre of the seliha, it originated in the early stages of the Eastern piyyut and was still written during the Spanish period. Alone among all the penitential genres it is not addressed to God and like certain reshuyot does not speak in the name of the people or the nation. Instead, the paytan turns to the individual worshiper and implores him to repent and confess his sins. At times the paytan will also turn to God and ask for forgiveness, while detailing man’s weakness and worthlessness. The genre was popular among the Spanish poets, as it dealt with the soul and its fate, both important subjects for them. They were often recited alongside the vidu’i (poem of confession) and on the Day of Atonement. See Avraham Ibn Ezra’s “You Whose Hearts Are Asleep” and, in Cole, Selected Ibn Gabirol, “Forget Your Grief.”
‘Udhri poetry: Elegiac poetry treating unrealized love in the early Arabic tradition. The term derives from the Yemeni Banu ‘Udhra, two of whose poets wrote powerfully of devotion to the beloved and a willingness to undergo hardship in love. Famous tragic lovers of the ‘Udhri tradition, such as Majnun and Layla, are separated but remain faithful and eventually die of sorrow. The tradition was developed further in Abbasid and Sufi contexts, and the Hebrew poets adopted various elements of it, especially in their religious verse. See Ibn Ghiyyat’s “My Wandering” and HaLevi’s “Love’s Dwelling.”
vidu’i: A section of the liturgy recited on fast days and days of penitence, especially those between the New Year and the Day of Atonement. Sometimes incorporated into larger piyyutim. See, for example, Ibn Gabirol’s Kingdom’s Crown and Avner’s “The Last Words of My Desire.”
wasf: See DESCRIPTIVE VERSE.
wine poetry: Generally speaking Hebrew poetry adopts the conventions of the Abbasid wine poem (khamriyya), which in turn traces its origin to the classical qasida. The Hebrew wine poems share numerous motifs that are freely employed: an imperative, urging others to drink; lush descriptions of the wine’s color, scent, age, effect, and provenance; description of the (male or female) cupbearer (the saqi); and description of the site where the drinking takes place—along a river, in a garden or palace, or indoors during the winter; and the conventional rebuke of fault-finders, who chastise the speaker for indulging in drink when they should be weeping over the abandoned campsite (Arabic) or the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (Hebrew)—or simply avoiding licentiousness and sin (both). The wine’s power to overcome grief is often noted, and sometimes religious, meditative, or even ethical dimensions are blended with the wine poem. The perspective of the poem almost always appears to be personal, though it is usually more stylized than, say, a poem of complaint. Like the Hebrew poems of desire, the Hebrew wine poems are not about indulgent or licentious behavior, but about sophisticated pleasure, perception, sensation, and company.
See HaNagid’s “Mixed in Spain,” “Your Years Are Sleep” and—in Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, “Have You Heard How I Helped the Wise”; also Ibn Gabirol’s “I’d Give Up My Soul Itself,” Moshe Ibn Ezra’s “Bring Me a Cup” and “A Shadow,” and Shelomo DePiera’s “This Year’s Wine.”
wit and entertainment, poems of—also riddles: This category covers a variety of poems that might also be subsumed under other generic headings. Some riddles, for instance, are descriptive, some of the poems of wit involve invective, and the poems of entertainment could treat any number of categories, from wine to invective to description. Most but not all of these poems were cast in epigrammatic form. See HaNagid’s “The Apple” and HaLevi’s “Inscriptions on Bowls” and “Four Riddles” (as well as the notes to them).
THE LOCKERT LIBRARY OF POETRY IN TRANSLATION
George Seferis: Collected Poems (1924–1955), translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo, translated and edited by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman
C. P. Cavafy: Selected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard and edited by George Savidis
Benny Andersen: Selected Poems, translated by Alexander Taylor
Selected Poetry of Andrea Zanzotto, edited and translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann
Poems of René Char, translated and annotated by Mary Ann Caws and Jonathan Griffin
Selected Poems of Tudor Arghezi, translated by Michael Impey and Brian Swann
“The Survivor” and Other Poems, by Tadeusz Rózewicz, translated and introduced by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire
“Harsh World” and Other Poems, by Angel González, translated by Donald D. Walsh
Ritsos in Parentheses, translated and introduced by Edmund Keeley
Salamander: Selected Poems of Robert Marteau, translated by Anne Winters
Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems, translated and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Dante’s “Rime,” translated by Patrick S. Diehl
Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, translated by Lisel Mueller
Osip Mandelstam’s “Stone,” translated and introduced by Robert Tracy
The Dawn Is Always New: Selected Poetry of Rocco Scotellaro, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann
Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, translated and introduced by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire
The Man I Pretend to Be: “The Colloquies” and Selected Poems of Guido Gozzano, translated and edited by Michael Palma, with an introductory essay by Eugenio Montale
D’Après Tout: Poems by Jean Follain, translated by Heather McHugh
Songs of Something Else: Selected Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf, translated by Leonard Nathan and James Larson
The Little Treasury of One Hundred People, One Poem Each, compiled by Fujiwara No Sadaie and translated by Tom Galt
The Ellipse: Selected Poems of Leonardo Sinisgalli, translated by W. S. Di Piero
The Difficult Days, by Robert Sosa, translated by Jim Lindsey
Hymns and Fragments, by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated and introduced by Richard Sieburth
The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobson, translated and edited by Roger Greenwald
Rilke: Between Roots, selected poems rendered from the German by Rika Lesser
In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated, edited, and introduced by Mark Anderson
Birds and Other Relations: Selected Poetry of Dezso Tandori, translated by Bruce Berlind
Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao, translated and introduced by Jeanne Larsen
The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated by Naomi Lazard
My Name on the Wind: Selected Poems of Diego Valeri, translated by Michael Palma
Aeschylus: The Suppliants, translated by Peter Burian
Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti, selected and translated by Zsuzsanna Ozváth and Frederick Turner
La Fontaine’s Bawdy: Of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers, translated by Norman R. Shapiro
A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, translated and edited by Rika Lesser
George Seferis: Collected Poems, Revised Edition, translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, Revised Edition, translated and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard and edited by George Savidis
Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole
The Late Poems of Meng Chiao, translated by David Hinton
Leopardi: Selected Poems, translated by Eamon Grennan
Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas, translated and edited by Roger Greenwald
The Complete Odes and Satires of Horace, translated with introduction and notes by Sidney Alexander
Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, translated by Peter Cole
Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology, translated by Daryl Hine
Night Journey, by María Negroni, translated by Anne Twitty
The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out, by Ana Enriqueta Terán, translated by Marcel Smith
Nothing Is Lost: Selected Poems, by Edward Kocbek, translated by Michael Scammell and Veno Taufer, and introduced by Michael Scammell
The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, translated with introduction and notes by Vincent Katz
Knowing the East, by Paul Claudel, translated with introduction and notes by James Lawler
Enough to Say It’s Far: Selected Poems of Pak Chaesam, translated by David R. McCann and Ji-won Shin
In Hora Mortis/Under the Iron of the Moon: Poems, by Thomas Bernhard, translated by James Reidel
The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems, by Luciano Erba, selected, introduced, and translated by Peter Robinson
The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, translated, edited, and introduced by Peter Cole
*Information for the glossary is drawn, for the most part, from Schirmann’s two-volume history (see p. xxii, this anthology); The Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (London/New York, 1998); Adonis, Arabic Poetics, trans. Catherine Cobham (Austin, 1990); Dan Pagis, Secular Poetry and Poetic Theory: Moses Ibn Ezra and His Contemporaries [Hebrew], ( Jerusalem, 1970); Shulamit Elitzur, Hebrew Poetry in Spain in the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2004), vols. 1–3; The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. S. Jayyusi (Leiden, 1994); Michael Sells, Desert Tracings (Middletown, 1989); Neal Kozodoy, “Reading Medieval Hebrew Love Poetry,” AJS Review 2 (1977); Proverbs/Ecclesiastes, ed. R.B.Y. Scott, The Anchor Bible (New York, 1965); Suzanne Stetkevych, Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the Abbasid Age (Leiden, 1991); Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York, 1965/79); and Raymond Scheindlin, Wine, Women, and Death (Philadelphia, 1986) and The Gazelle (Philadelphia, 1991).