Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid

by Shmuel HaNagid, Peter Cole (Translator)

Overview

The first major poet of the Hebrew literary renaissance of Moslem Spain, Shmuel Ben Yosef Ha-Levi HaNagid (993-1056 c.e.) was also the Prime Minister of the Muslim state of Granada, battlefield commander of the non-Jewish Granadan army, and one of the leading religious figures in a medieval Jewish world that stretched from Andalusia to Baghdad. Peter Cole's groundbreaking versions of HaNagid's poems capture the poet's combination of secular and religious passion, as well as his inspired linking of Hebrew and Arabic poetic practice. This annotated Selected Poems is the most comprehensive collection of HaNagid's work published to date in English.

"The Multiple Troubles of Man"

The multiple troubles of man,
my brother, like slander and pain,
amaze you? Consider the heart which holds them all in strangeness, and doesn't break.


"I'd Suck Bitter Poison from the Viper's Mouth"

I'd suck bitter poison from the viper's mouth and live by the basilisk's hole forever,
rather than suffer through evenings with boors,
fighting for crumbs from their table.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691011202
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/24/1996
Series:	The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation , #43
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Peter Cole is the author of Rift, a collection of poems.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

An Andalusian Chronology

On Fleeing His City

The Miracle at Sea

A Curse

The Apple

Jasmine

The Gazelle

The Fawn

Where's That Coy Gazelle

In Fact I Love That Fawn

I'll Show You a Fawn

They Stole My Sleep

His Brother's Illness

On the Death of Isaac, His Brother

The Friends

The House of Prayer

The Critique

The Pain

What Are These

A Day of Distress

The Victory Over Seville

The Dream

The War with Yadir

On Lifting the Siege

Your Manuscript Shines

To Yehosef, His Son

Pass of Sand

Among My Friends

Rise Early

Your Years Are Sleep

Sad Friend

How I Helped the Wise

Rouge in Appearance

Take the Crystal

Truth Is Hard

When the Lord Is with You

One Who Works and Buys Himself Books

How Could You Loathe

Forgive the Man Who Sinned Against You

If You're Finding the Good at Fault

Delay Your Speech

I'd Suck Bitter Poison from the Viper's Mouth

If You Don't Have the Power to Pay

He Who Lingers at the Court of the King

In Business Don't Get Involved

If You Shame a Man

People Welcome the Rich

He Whose Heart in His Heart

If You Leave a Long-Loved Friend

Respect and Discretion

The Rich Are Small

You Who'd Be Wise

When You're Desperate

It's Heart that Discerns

Stab Your Heart

Is There Any Frustration

Did Your Father Leave You Glory

Could Kings Right a People Gone Bad

The King

He'll Bring You Trouble

The Wise Understand

Assistants Come to Judgment in Groups

The Good Students Tend

What's Familiar Is Sometimes Distanced

The Heart Holds Hidden Knowledge

First War

Soar, Don't Settle

Commerce Has Markets

Three Things

The Foolish Enemy's Face Tells All

Man's Wisdom Is in What He Writes

Gazing Through the Night

Lovers of Life

The Multiple Troubles of Man

Be Glad, She Said

Earth to Man

Your Loved Ones Depress You

Soul Opens Inside You

The Child at One or Two

Fear Five to the Power of Five

I Quartered the Troops for the Night

Why Repeat the Sins

Time Defies and Betrays the Patricians

You Felt the Fear of Death

Why Should the Hearts of You Purists

Luxuries Ease

You're Trapped, My Tongue

Friends, a Fence Surrounds Us

Youth Brings Us

He Who Depends on the Princes

On Their Couches Stretched Out at the Treasury

Come Up and See the Court

Suffer the World

The Market

Flutter or Rest

See the Fraud Flow By

The Earthquake

Two Eclipses

The Tyrant Who Rules the Homeless and Poor

My Spirit

The Black of My Hair

Ask the Dead and They'll Tell You

Send the Lord to the People

Cast Your Bread

Know of the Limbs

You Mock Me Now in Your Youth

You Think There's No Hell That Will Hold You

You Look Through Open Eyes

Everything Hidden

Notes

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

Medieval Hebrew poetry is particularly difficult to render poetically in English. Peter Cole's remarkable translations, in this vital sense, are a splendid achievement.
— (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Columbia University)

From the Publisher

"Here is indeed a remarkable event . . . the unearthing of a major and until today mostly ignored Andalusian Hebrew poet . . . The poetry itself sings as it once did in another language, culture, and time, thanks to Peter Cole's erudition and poetic sensibility. Not only are major translation problems overcome by intelligence and sensitivity, but the introduction provides informative observations concerning both the Arabic and Hebrew poetic traditions in Moslem Spain. These are poems to be remembered, especially since, in working through conflicting theories of translations, they have perfectly managed to avoid all the current pitfalls, all the circumlocutions and tricks."—Award Citation, 1998 MLA-Scaglione Prize for Translation

"These very fine translations of the work of a remarkable medieval poet gain their authority as much from the literary gifts of the poet-translator as from his linguistic and historical knowledge. They convince us by their strong and supple appeal to the ear, as well as by their diction. For the English-speaking reader, this volume of lyric, epigram and epic narrative brings a treasure to light in the way it deserves to be presented."—John Hollander, Yale University

"Medieval Hebrew poetry is particularly difficult to render poetically in English. Peter Cole's remarkable translations, in this vital sense, are a splendid achievement."—Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Columbia University

John Hollander

These very fine translations of the work of a remarkable medieval poet gain their authority as much from the literary gifts of the poet-translator as from his linguistic and historical knowledge. They convince us by their strong and supple appeal to the ear, as well as by their diction. For the English-speaking reader, this volume of lyric, epigram and epic narrative brings a treasure to light in the way it deserves to be presented.
— (John Hollander, Yale University)

Award Citation

Here is indeed a remarkable event . . . the unearthing of a major and until today mostly ignored Andalusian Hebrew poet . . . The poetry itself sings as it once did in another language, culture, and time, thanks to Peter Cole's erudition and poetic sensibility. Not only are major translation problems overcome by intelligence and sensitivity, but the introduction provides informative observations concerning both the Arabic and Hebrew poetic traditions in Moslem Spain. These are poems to be remembered, especially since, in working through conflicting theories of translations, they have perfectly managed to avoid all the current pitfalls, all the circumlocutions and tricks.
— Award Citation, 1998 MLA-Scaglione Prize for Translation

Editorial Reviews

"Cole has condensed enormous learning into a tightly composed and subtly informing format."

The Jerusalem Post

Winner of the 1998 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Translation Prize, Modern Language Association

Peter Cole, Winner of a 2010 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Peter Cole is the recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship

From the Publisher

"Taut, light-footed translations . . . remarkable in the degree to which they carry over the distinct poetic complexities of the original while retaining a crisp, contemporary sense of American poetics . . . the quality of motion and emotion comes through directly."

Village Voice Literary Supplement

"[Cole's HaNagid] represents the admission of the Hebrew Golden Age into the world of general literature. And high time, too."

Commentary

"Entertainingly complex, intriguingly foreign, and strikingly human."

The Forward

Excellent.

American Poet

Cole . . . brings to this work his exquisite sensitivity to matters of art and Judaism. The poems are delightful and significant still, across the ages.

Conservative Judaism

Translating HaNagid is an immense challenge . . . yet Cole, a Jerusalem poet, meets the challenge. The poems are melodic with the music of English . . . The images are fresh without being anachronistic. Excellent notes explain not only the Biblical, but the Arabic borrowings.

The Jerusalem Report

Samuel the Nagid astonishes as a personality, and when read does not disappoint. Cole's generous offering of verse translations brings to the English reader the full range of the Nagid's poetry: accounts of the terrors and exultations of war; poems about love and lovely, frail pleasures; poems of grief; considerations of mortality . . . and snappy epigrams on society and the human condition . . . a fine, breathing, contemporary version of an old master.

Prooftexts

Fresh, worldly, intimate, and wise . . . supple, and sensitive translations.

Booklist

. . . magnificent . . . offers a comprehensive and rich selection of HaNagid's poems . . . Cole has paid close attention to the rhythm and syntax of the Hebrew distich, and he reconstructs them with exemplary grace in his English lines. In the quatrains and shorter poems he incorporates a scattering of full rhyme, though always with a light touch, and in some poems he introduces surprising ruptures and daring enjambments into the syntactic flow, imparting a resilience and tension to the text that were missing in the work of his predecessors.

Ha'aretz

. . .a wonder of poetic alchemy. [Cole's] deftly cadenced translations embody, as Pound demanded, 'trace of that power which implies the man'. They are delicately poised between fidelity to the Hebrew and an ear finely-tuned to the possibilities of a modern, poetic idiom in English . . . At last HaNagid's gift resonates for the English reader.

Poetry Nation Review

I do not believe that the miracle of . . . Hebrew rebirth in Andalusia could find a more attractive English version today.

Ariel - Zvi Yagendorf

Thanks to [Cole's] Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid and Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, those of us who don't know Hebrew can, for the first time, hear why HaNagid and Ibn Gabirol have been revered for centuries.

Lingua Franca

Taut, light-footed translations . . . remarkable in the degree to which they carry over the distinct poetic complexities of the original while retaining a crisp, contemporary sense of American poetics . . . the quality of motion and emotion comes through directly.

Village VoiceLiterary Supplement

Thanks to [Cole's] Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid and Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, those of us who don't know Hebrew can, for the first time, hear why HaNagid and Ibn Gabirol have been revered for centuries.

"Lingua Franca ot Weinberger

I do not believe that the miracle of . . . Hebrew rebirth in Andalusia could find a more attractive English version today.
— Zvi Yagendorf

Ariel

As a leading light of Andalusia (Muslim Spain), Shmuel Ben Yosef Ha-Levi HaNagid (993-1056) had many public roles: spice trader, battlefield commander, tax collector, Chief Vizier of Grenada. He was also, according to poet and translator Cole (Rift), the first great poet of the Hebrew renaissance of Muslim Spain. The poems of the first section, "After Psalms,'' formally evoke the songs of King David, another poet-warrior, while treating epic events of the poet's own time, such as "The Miracle at Sea'' or a "Victory Over Seville.'' While the psalm-like poems read very much like the King James translation, the 37 aphorisms of the second section, "After Proverbs,'' often seem to prefigure the worldy-wise irony of later Yiddish literature ("The rich are small in number/ and the brilliant likewise are few;/ and the number of each is further reduced/ when they step side by side into view.''). The final section, "After Ecclesiastes,'' shows HaNagid coping with age: "I'm old, but I've seen the carpenters/ building their coffins for boys.'' 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 moderneven enlightenedbreadth, even as the rest of Europe languished in its Dark Ages. Notes and a bibliography are included.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Just turn to any poem in this volume and read it without knowing anything about the poet. It will strike you as fresh, worldly, intimate, and wise. Then turn to the informative introduction and discover that HaNagid was a Spanish Hebrew poet and political leader, a key figure in the flowering of Jewish and Arabic culture in medieval Spain. His works were lost for centuries, until the 1920s when a Hebrew poet and scholar named Haim Nahman Bialik came across a "crate of old manuscripts. . . an incomparable treasure," and HaNagid was resurrected. Now, in Peter Cole's brand-new, supple, and sensitive translations, we can absorb HaNagid's highly personal interpretations of biblical lore, history as he knew it, and politics, particularly (talk about dejavu) the animosity between Arab and Jew. HaNagid was lyrical and epic, witty and emotional, religious and secular, traditional yet, to our ears, all but modern.

Donna Seaman

Fresh, worldly, intimate, and wise.

BookList

Translating HaNagid is an immense challenge ... yet Cole, a Jerusalem poet, meets the challenge. The poems are melodic with the music of English ... The images are fresh without being anachronistic. Excellent notes explain not only the Biblical, but the Arabic borrowings.

Jerusalem Report

Cole has condensed enormous learning into a tightly composed and subtly informing format.

Jerusalem Post

"Fresh, worldly, intimate, and wise . . . supple, and sensitive translations."

Booklist