TO THE READER

THIS BOOK was born of a fascination that evolved into addiction. Medieval Hebrew poetry and the extensive spadework its translation involves have held me in their sway for more than two decades now, and The Dream of the Poem seeks to account for the effect of both that initial, unmediated encounter with the verse and the more complex but no less charged engagement that has come with time. These translations have, then, been made with an eye toward being read without annotation—and readers are encouraged to do just that—though I have also provided substantial notes to most of the poems and a glossary of key terms for those who would like to be taken further into the gravitational field of medieval Hebrew poetics.

The poems gathered in this volume reflect a combination of concerns: I have tried, first of all, to give a full-bodied sense of the major poets from the Muslim and Christian periods, and so have included substantial selections by Shmu’el HaNagid, Shelomo Ibn Gabirol, Moshe Ibn Ezra, Yehuda HaLevi, Avraham Ibn Ezra, Yehuda Alharizi, and Todros Abulafia. At the same time I’ve made every effort to bring attention to the truly surprising range of (often overlooked) writers who were active during these five centuries, and to that end have translated work by an additional forty-seven poets, including several important writers from Provence. (Southern France was, during the lifetime of these poets, under the dominion of the northern Spanish kingdoms and, so far as Hebrew culture was concerned, should be considered a cultural extension of Catalonia and Aragon.) Though many of the poems appear in Haim Schirmann’s invaluable four-volume Hebrew anthology HaShira Ha‘Ivrit biSefarad uveProvans [Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provence], 2d ed. (1954; Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1959), more than half of them do not—in some instances because, in the years when Schirmann was collecting his material, they hadn’t yet been retrieved from libraries and private collections scattered around the globe. My selection, therefore, reflects canonical preferences, recent findings, and my own tastes, and was made after rereading the entire corpus of the literature. My goal throughout has been to present a gathering that would do justice to the richness and evolving accomplishment of the five-hundred-plus years of this poetry. The development of that poetry is traced in the biographical introductions to the poets, while the emergence of the poetry, its cultural and literary background, and the implications of that background for translation are treated in the introduction.

For material in the biographical sketches and the notes on the period’s poetics, I have relied heavily on Haim Schirmann’s magisterial Toldot HaShira Ha‘Ivrit biSefarad HaMuslamit (The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain) and Toldot HaShira Ha‘Ivrit biSefarad HaNotzrit uveDarom Tzarfat (The History of Hebrew Poetry in Christian Spain and Southern France), both edited, supplemented, and annotated by Ezra Fleischer ( Jerusalem, 1995/97), as well as on Schirmann’s Hebrew anthology. Unless otherwise noted, references to Schirmann and Fleischer in what follows refer to the two-volume history.

Throughout the volume, transliteration of both Hebrew and Arabic words avoids all diacritical marks apart from the inverse apostrophe to indicate the Hebrew ‘ayin and the Arabic ‘ain. The Hebrew letter het and the guttural, aspirated haa of Arabic are transliterated as h, as are the Hebrew hey and the nonguttural Arabic haa. Long Arabic vowels are indicated by a double English vowel (e.g., rahiil), except when the word has to a certain extent entered English (e.g., diwan, or qasida). When an Arabic word contains more than one long vowel, only the stressed syllable is transliterated with two vowels. Other elements of the transcription are straightforward enough. On the whole, my aim has been to help the general reader approximate correct pronunciation.

Readers who wish to consult the original Hebrew texts of these poems will find them posted with an index at www.pup.princeton.edu, under the listing for this volume. Those interested in Hebrew commentary and critical apparatus will find them in the source volumes listed in my notes for each poem.