Abstract
Peter Cole's The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 offers fresh translations of a rich corpus of Hebrew verse, some known to English reading audiences, some presented here for the first time. In addition to establishing himself as a fine poet in his own right, Cole had already applied his poetic talent to translating select poems of two of the great Hebrew poets of al-Andalus, Samuel Ha-Nagid and Solomon Ibn Gabirol. His translation style mixes the contemporary with the archaic, eschewing the Elizabethan and Victorian styles of earlier translators (what Cole calls a "wax-museum-like school of translation", 17), abandoning the rhyme of the original, but nonetheless preserving many idioms and allusions strange to the English ear within a sound world that gives that same ear thrill, aiming first and foremost to re-create something of the original's power and force. But it is not Cole's translation method that I wish to address here - this [End Page 167] is best left to other translators. Rather, I wish to discuss The Dream of the Poem as an anthology, pointing first to a few of the early English anthologies (between 1851 and 1917) that include the Hebrew poets of Spain, and then returning to the contemporary intellectual, cultural and political worlds to which Cole's volume speaks most eloquently.