The Golden Age
Hebrew Poems From Spain. Introduction, Translation, and Notes
by David Goldstein.
Schocken Books. 176 pp. $5.95
The flowering of Hebrew poetry in Spain in the two centuries between 1000 and 1200 C.E. is a perpetual challenge to scholarship and to criticism. A challenge to historical scholarship, because the reason why this kind of Hebrew literature should flourish only in this period of Jewish history is hard to determine, and a challenge to criticism because the special uses of imagery and rhythms resulting from the impact of Arabic poetry on the Jewish literary mind are difficult to assess as well as impossible to imitate in English in a manner that is both accurate and effective. David Goldstein, in his concise and lucid introduction to his English versions of some seventy of these poems, sees the revival of Hebrew poetry in Spain as “a direct consequence of two factors: the residence of the Jews in Muslim lands, and the Jews' reappraisal of the Bible.” The former brought the influence of Arabic poetic styles and procedures and the latter “a reopening of the Jewish mind and imagination to the actual words of the Bible.” One can hardly deny this, yet the precise nature of the acculturation which, for example, led Samuel Ha-Nagid to write both drinking songs and a poem of praise to God for the victory of the army of Granada, (commanded by the poet), over that of Seville, demands fuller explanation.
It is worth pausing at this victory poem. Its Hebrew title is simply tehilah (“praise” or “song of praise”), although Mr. Goldstein helpfully calls it “The Victory over Ben Abbad.” The Hebrew consists of about 15 lines, each divided into two sections, with the last syllable of each word of each line ending in the syllable -im (which, as the masculine plural ending in Hebrew, is not difficult to find). Roughly transliterated, the opening goes like this:
Hali taas b'chol-shana
phealim
k'phaal'cha le-avot
va-atsilim
Ve-li tishchat k'phirim
kats'phirim
ve-li tizbach sh'chalim
kar'chelim
Literally:
Will you do for me every
year deeds
Like your deed for the fathers
and the noble ones?
Will you slaughter for me
young lions like he-goats
And sacrifice for me lions
like ewes?
Mr. Goldstein renders:
Will you perform for me
every year deeds
Like those you executed
for the princes and patriarchs?
Will you slaughter lions
for me instead of goats,
And offer them instead of
ewes for sacrifice?
This is fairly literal, and has a fine strong sound. But—and this happens again and again in translating this sort of Hebrew poetry—the special form and sound of the original disappears. One just cannot do it in English. Indeed, one sometimes wonders exactly what to make of it in the original Hebrew. Line upon line upon line, each with an identical number of syllables stressed in exactly the same places and each line ending with the same syllable—this is not the Hebrew poetry of the Psalms or the prophets; it has a kind of splendid rhetorical monotony slightly resembling what one sometimes gets in Whitman (but Whitman's rhythms are never so regular). On the whole, Mr. Goldstein has not attempted to reproduce the poetic form of the original, and has “judged more by an English eye and ear rather than by a desire to be faithful to the Hebrew poetic structure.” This was a wise decision, and results in highly effective English versions.
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Effective, yet—like the Hebrew, only in a different way—puzzling. The parallelism of the passage quoted above (which has its affinities with, but is not really the same as, the parallelism of biblical Hebrew poetry) beats on throughout the poem and we end by admiring the dogged inventiveness of the poet rather than by appreciating the vitality of the poetry. Some things, of course, are bound to be missing in the English. References to, echoes of, variations on, as well as actual verbatim quotation of biblical passages run through all this Hebrew poetry. There is hardly a line by Judah Halevi which has not some reference to a biblical text. The peculiarly teasing way in which this can be done in Hebrew-is impossible to reproduce in English, and the best thing for an English translator is to ignore the biblical echoes and be content to point them out in notes. And then there are puns and doubles entendres which are very difficult to reproduce in another language. For example, the biblical word for a young lion, k'fir, employed in the passage quoted above, has in addition another biblical meaning, “young hero.” This is a simple extension of meaning, compared to the complex plays on words to which the special nature of the Hebrew language lends itself (and the special nature of the English language doesn't). Much, therefore, of the artifice of the originals is bound to be lost. This is a pity, because the artifice is often great, and even if one does not always know how to take it, it is there, to be looked at and wondered at. Because most of the kinds of artifice employed are not available to the English language, the writer of English versions must be content with an altogether looser kind of poem. Occasionally, in a short lyric, Mr. Goldstein attempts with considerable success to provide English equivalents for the form of the original; but in the longer poems, as he recognizes, to attempt to do this would be a mistake.
The range of these poems, both secular and devotional, will surprise the reader who imagines all Hebrew poetry before the present century to be religious; yet I must confess that the devotional poems, in this selection at least, have the truest ring. Solomon Ibn Gabirol's Shachar Avakeshcha (“In the morning I look for you”) has that moving quality of lyric expressiveness, reminiscent in a way of George Herbert, that the poems about gardens and girls and apples and wine rarely possess. This Ibn Gabirol poem is in fact included in the morning liturgy for Sabbaths and festivals—one is surprised at the degree to which the best religious poems of this period have been recognized by the compilers of the Jewish prayerbook. Still, it is good for one's view of the Jewish genius to see Isaac Ibn Kalpon's poem upon the gift of a cheese or Samuel Ha-Nagid's charming, if deliberately artificial, little poem of invitation to a party with wine and girls (yet not, I think, as charming a poem as another by the same poet on the same theme, not included in this selection, the “Invitation to Drink Wine” with its splendid last lines: “for the earth to our eyes is like a laughing girl, and the world is like a dancer . . .”). Very late in the history of this poetic flowering, Judah Al-Harizi wrote his Songs of Love and Desire from which Mr. Goldstein culls one lyric:
The lute sounds at the
young girl's breast,
Soothing the heart with
its gracious tone;
Like a child weeping in
its mother's arms,
While she sings and smiles
at his tears.
The imagery here is not an echo of the Song of Songs, as in so much of the love poetry of Judah Halevi; it is secular in its own right. I may be wrong, but I can hear no biblical echo at all in the image of the child crying at its mother's breast while its mother sings to it, in spite of the fact that the prophets are full of mother-and-child images. The last phrase in the Hebrew—v'hi tashir v'tsochakat l'vichyo—seems to me moving and original. This singing and weeping belong (in my frame of reference at least) not to the Bible but to the same area as Carducci's
tramontano le stelle in
mezzo al mare
e si spengono i canti entro
il mio core.
The stars go down into the
midst of the sea
and the songs die away in
my heart.
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But Judah Halevi remains the greatest of these poets, and Mr. Goldstein gives him good representation, except for his poems of friendship and his elegies, none of which is included. Translating Halevi into English verse is peculiarly difficult, as I know, because I once tried my hand at rendering the great Tsiyon halo tishali, the Ode to Zion, with indifferent success. Mr. Goldstein does well with the relatively violent poems in which Halevi argues with himself and his friends about his determination to go to the Holy Land, or describes a storm at sea. Here the craftsmanship is less important than the sheer strength of the poetic argument, which can be reproduced in fairly rough-hewn English. The shorter, more delicate poems are more difficult. Here is Mr. Goldstein's version of Ya'avor Alai R'tsoncha, “Let your favor pass to me”:
Your anger has enveloped me.
Envelop me now with love.
Shall my sin stand between me
and you for ever?
How long shall I seek your
companionship in vain?
I uphold your right hand. You
have enslaved me to the
stranger.
You who dwell on cherub's wings,
outstretched above the ark,
Arise, look down from your
dwelling.
Save my people, my redeemer.
I don't know how he could have done better than this, but all the same it misses so much. In the first place, it reverses the order of both the opening and the concluding sentences, and thus loses an important effect. The Hebrew opens:
Ya'avor alai r'tsoncha
ka-asher avar charonchaLet your favor pass to me
as your anger has passed away.
The chiming of r'tsoncha and charoncha, “your favor” and “your anger,” is made possible by the Hebrew second-person possessive suffix, cha, just as most Hebrew rhymes are made possible by the place of suffixes in the language. Further, the meter of the original is strict, each half-line consisting of eight syllables which are in turn divided into two groups of long-short-long-long. This gives a special kind of lift to the poem. The last two lines go:
he-avdetani l'zarim
va-ani chanat y'min'cha
Literally:
You have enslaved me to
strangers
and I am the companion
of your right hand.
goali lig'ol hamonai
rom vehashkeph mim'on'cha
Literally:
My Redeemer! to redeem my
multitudes
rise and look out from
your dwelling
There is an epigrammatic force in the balancing and rhyming of the original which a literal rendering absurdly misses and which even the controlled rephrasing of Mr. Goldstein does not capture.
It may be said that I am blaming Mr. Goldstein for not achieving the impossible. But I am not blaming him, only using some of his renderings to illustrate the nature of the problem. Although he has not achieved the impossible, he has produced poems that read well as English poems and give some idea of the range and interest of the originals. The book is well introduced and unpretentiously annotated. Mr. Goldstein, in short, has tackled a difficult task extremely well, and I hope his collection will be widely read.
