Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome, called Manoello, the greatest Hebrew poet of medieval Italy, was born in Rome, about 1270. For a time, he served as a dignitary in the Rome Jewish community; but his restlessness, and possibly the displeasure of the Italian baale batim (“pillars of the community”) with the eroticism of his verse, led him through Perugia, Camerino, Verona, and Fermo before his death sometime after 1328. Way stations for his scholarship were a Hebrew grammar and commentaries on all the books of the Bible. But scholarship and restlessness alike found a more enduring place in Immanuel’s masterpiece, his poetic work the Mahberoth (“Compositions”), a collection of his poems, short stories, treatises, meditations, and the like.
At his back, Immanuel heard the Hebrew poets of the Golden Age in Spain, the lyrics of Provence, and Italy’s first songs; and at his side, the voices of Dante and the generation of the dolce stil nuovo. From his Hebrew and Arabic predecessors, he took the lyric convention of Moorish Spain; the native, though often outworn, Hebrew stock of images and snatches from the Song of Songs; and as a form for the separate sections of the Mahberoth, the makama, a debate or contest between the journeying poet and rivals met along the way. From Italian poetry, he borrowed the sonnet; and from Dante, the structure of the last section of the Mahberoth, a journey through hell and heaven, in somewhat stumbling parody of the Commedia.
But more than assimilation or adaptation awaits the reader of Immanuel. The Mahberoth is like a bedside manual, though hardly of devotions. For every vagrant impulse, the poet has fashioned either sonnet, quatrain, epigram, or a rhyming-prose harangue that weaves through escapades of love, word-duels, songs of insult, and random pieties and didacticisms. The total impression is of an often engaging, always glib poet, redeemed for memory by four graces: genuine humor; a sensuality alive enough to earn for the Mahberoth a prohibition by Joseph Caro in his Shulhan Aruch; invention in conceit; and the cunning of an ironsmith in shaping the Hebrew language to forms and sentiments it had never known before.
Not that judgment is important in reading Immanuel. There is little time for it. The line of his verse is serpentine; before one coil, recoil is done, another has begun. All is in the passing, pleasing undulations. These Immanuel has.
And so, I hope, do these translations. The liberties I have taken with the letter are hardly drastic; and with the soul, as few as time’s long passage and the motley births of language have allowed.—Allen Mandelbaum
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The Joys of Camerino
“Where does your heart’s encampment lie?” their question
came, and my reply, “In Camerino”;
there was soul’s desire, there we gathered
aloes, myrrh, and spices sovereign.
From death the doomed redeeméd were, and there,
I warrant, God’s own city we beheld,
where damsels, in God’s exaltation, reveled;
two cakes of purest manna were our fare.
Upon my life, on maidens’ cheeks I have
seen tears, and heard, like throbbing flutes, their love
entreating, “Till when are we your prisoners?”
Why moan, my soul, or sigh? To Camerino’s
nymphs, send greetings, for they cried, “Alas,
the wanderer, who rends our heart’s enclosure.”
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Song
Be not dismayed
if one whose ardor,
but today,
was fragrant as
mandragora
Should find his splendor
all has fled
when he’s a-bed
with his belovèd,
Ophra;
For the sun
is not eclipsed
and not undone
until the moon
and he are one.
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From the Hungry, Praise
I gaze on manna and on quail,
but voices warn, “Approach not here”;
the banquet now is but a dream,
bereft, the grandeur of my soul.
For heart’s redeemer is the onion,
onion, garlic, leek, my peace,
and for my soul-ills, unction.
Garlic is earth’s stag and blossom,
Grace did bear him, Glory robed him,
over him—the Great Bear and her sons.
And wheel in wheel, like heaven’s spheres,
the onion’s skin; the leek, Elisha’s
wand, in wondrous miracles.
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The Shrew
So Shall a man assay his soul
enduring evil womankind—
for as the howling desert wolf—
her hair may change, but not her mind.
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Time’s Wit
Time crossed his hands in giving all
the graceful lasses to the fools,
who both night and day travail
to feast and gown their lovelies well.
While they seek chambers of delight
where gallants greet the lips of love
and, like the mocking thief, or slave,
for shadows yearn, the fall of night.
For had gazelles to stags been given,
then stag of stag would know but treason,
or love be shorn of excellence.
Ours be gazelles whom fools shall fatten,
and our dalliance be their pain;
evil take them, and the curse.
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In Hell, Heaven
The soul within me shuns the Garden
and will court the vale of Tophet;
in Hell, the honeycomb is sweet,
the women beauteous and wanton.
What have I in Eden, where
no loved one is, but charred as pitch,
old ladies with the scurvy itch,
my soul would not be happy—there.
Then Eden, what have I with thee,
where all are maimed and impotent,
thou art as nothing in my eyes;
but Tophet gathers grace and glory,
each gazelle wears radiance,
and all delight the eye.
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Allen Mandelbaum, the translator of these poems, was born in 1926, graduated from Yeshiva College in 1945, and holds a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University. He has published poetry in Furioso, and is at present working on a study of poetic drama.
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