The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation)
"Virtually stagnant since late Biblical times, Hebrew poetry and the language itself would be transformed by a succession of poets of genius and their imitators. In Peter Cole's rich new anthology, the extent of their astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English.... His versions are masterly."--Eric Ormsby, New York Times Book Review"Perpetually astonishing. The central figures in Peter Cole's anthology are great by any standards.... [They] provoke love in any reader of Hebrew literature, and by [a] miracle of Cole's own creation, in any reader of little or no Hebrew who directly confronts the work of this major poet-translator.... Superb."--Harold Bloom, New York Review of Books"The book is a treasure trove, a labour of love and exceptional erudition, which will open up to the reader a world of poetry and culture as rich as anything in human civilization."--Times Literary Supplement"...[Cole] has performed an enormous service and produced a book which is by turns moving, charming, and funny. No one after this will be able to write a book on medieval poetry without taking the Hebrew and Arabic poets of Spain into account."--Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement"Meticulously edited and captivating anthology.... [P]oetic scholarship at its best.... [A] major translation project."--Marjorie Perloff, Bookforum"Peter Cole offers us an unprecedented gift, bringing to life a body of Hebrew poetry that, wrote Harold Bloom, can at its best 'rival the magnificences of Scripture'....[Cole's] achievement in bringing us this volume is as death-defying an act as any ever undertaken by the poets he presents within its pages."--Esther Allen, Bomb Magazine"Traversing five centuries, four hundred poems, and fifty poets, the anthology represents a remarkable literature that evolved and flourished between the East and the West, between sacred and the profane, and amid the collision and collusion of traditions, religions, and languages . . . all bolstered by Cole's extensive introductions, biographies, commentary, and glossaries."--American PoetPraise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton):"Cole's translations . . . shimmer: they convey the power and mystique of the original."--ChoicePraise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton): "Fresh, worldly, intimate, and wise."--BooklistPraise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton): "Cole's vigorous inventive translation is equal to the task of rendering [the] work [of a poet] whose range encompassed commerce and God, war and wine. HaNagid emerges as a man of identifiably modern--even enlightened--breadth, even as the rest of Europe languished in its Dark Ages."--Publishers WeeklyENDORSEMENTS:"A sterling work of translation of unsurpassed scope, quality and importance."--Ross Brann, Cornell University"The finest labor of poetic translation I have seen in many years.... An entire revelation."--Richard Howard, University of Houston