Translator's Note

Ibn Gabirol was one of the preeminent Hebrew poets during the startling period of Andalusian cultural production Jewish history calls the Golden Age. In a moment of symbiosis in Islamic Spain from the 11th to 12th centuries CE, Hebrew poetry flowered as it had not since the Bible and would not again until the modern era. A Jewish courtier class arose serving Muslim rulers, steeped in their Arabic language and culture. Poetry was central to that culture, prized and woven throughout social life, and the new Jewish elite sponsored the creation of a Hebrew poetry to compete and converse with its Arabic counterparts. Jewish poets adapted Arabic poetics to Hebrew, including quantitative meters and a purist approach to lexicon, while adopting Arabic poetry’s embrace of secular alongside religious verse. 

In keeping with their Arabic models, the Golden Age poets wrote for the most part a highly, almost extravagantly ornamental verse. Their work is sonically lush with alliteration, assonance and interwoven consonants and vowels; and syntactically dense with double and triple puns, homonyms and other word-play. It is also written within elaborate formal constraints in a Biblical Hebrew which layers it with intertextual reference to that canon, as well as the contemporary Arabic poetry on which it is modeled. No translation can encompass all aspects of the original, especially when dealing with profoundly multi-faceted texts from a distant context.

What I experience above all reading these texts is an utter reveling in the materiality of language. For example, here is a transliteration of the first verse of [Winter with its showers]:

Katav stav b’dyo matarav u’vrivivav / u’v’et b’rakav ha’me’irim v’khaf-avav

A rough literal translation might read: “winter wrote with the ink of its rains and showers / and with the quill of its illuminating lightning and with the palm of its clouds.” This short pastoral poem, which draws on common tropes in Arabic poetry that liken nature to the work of an artist or craftsman, begins with a virtuoso performance of ornament: the “vav” sound, the end-rhyme of all three verses, is echoed five times, and the “ah” vowel sound runs through the verse further tying it together. (Slyly, the poem celebrates the work of nature as surpassing anything a human artist could accomplish, while showing off its own dazzling artistry.) My translation strives to approach such aural density using what I feel are the most available resources of contemporary English, particularly assonance and alliteration. Thus my first verse is threaded with four w and three p sounds, and the diphthongs of shower and down. Privileging the music can mean sacrificing precision of content. Thus in the verse above I chose “pen” instead of “quill” for its alliteration with “pour” and “palm.” 

Both of these poems are written in the qasida form (an Arabic word sometimes translated as “ode”): a series of mono-rhymed verses broken into hemistichs. In translating the poems here I have used couplets to give some feel for the original’s orderly, highly organized form.

Dan Alter

In the Classroom