The last great book I read was The Dream of the Poem, translated, edited and introduced by Peter Cole.
Well, that’s a lie. I should say that it’s the great book I dabble in, here and there, in frantic, frenetic moments, moments that invariably make me turn the music up loud and run around the house, wishing there was a reasonable way to tattoo the star of David and moon of Islam on my respective fists. Truth is, the book’s a tome, and unless you’re a scholar of Hebrew Poetry or Moorish Spain, or simply a much better man than I am, you’re unlikely to read this thing from cover to cover. But you should. I picked the book up after hearing Cole read a few years ago at the University of Utah’s guest writers reading series. At the time, I was polishing a novel that featured a heretical translation of the Tehillim (psalms, for those of you who’ve lacked the good fortune of an ultra-orthodox Jewish education). In the course of writing that book – or perhaps this is why I wrote that book – I’d worked on my own translation of the Tehillim. Because Hebrew relies on a system of shoreshes, three-letter roots, for its words, words carry traces of other words (must have made Derrida so damn happy). These traces allow for an infinite and maniacal system of puns and double-entendres. This problem only gets worse when one realizes that whole sentences in the Tehillim are lifted out of Ugarist poems worshipping the gods of sky and water. Honestly, I do think that the Tehillim are a heretical work recuperated by the King James and some real fear of Hebrew poetry, but I digress. Peter Cole had unearthed five centuries of Jewish poetry, written in Spain, in Hebrew, between the end of the tenth century and 1492 (yes, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue). At his reading, he read some of the Hebrew before his translations. It was stunning. His translations were stunning, too, but I did suffer a moment’s disappointment when the book arrived in the mail – turns out my local independent bookstore does not stock this one – and realized that the book only included the English.
That disappointment was short-lived. The translations are excellent, and the introductions to each poet contain the kinds of fantastical biographies that were the stuff of my pre-adolescent daydreams. You know the kind: the ones in which you and an unusually apt tree branch re-imagined as a scimitar, and the space behind your backyard-grapefruit tree, allow you to command wild and bloody battles.
Take, for example, Shmuel HaNagid. Here’s a dude who flees a Berber revolt and ends up young, impoverished, and on his own. He opens a spice shop, and begins working as a scribe. His handwriting is pretty enough to impress the Malagan Vizier, who takes him into his court. From there he has a helter-skelter decade of ascension that leads him to Granada. Another decade goes by and he’s promoted to chief vizier of the Andalusian Caliphate. For those of you less versed in Moorish political positions, the chief vizier sits between the ruler and his subjects. Think of him as prime minister for a king who has actual power. All this from fancy handwriting! But that’s not all. When Shmuel is promoted to chief vizier, he’s also made head of the Spanish Muslim military. And he’s no Donald Rumsfeld behind a desk in the Pentagon plying his pretty letters abstractly to matters of life and death. He rides at the head of the army when it goes into battle for sixteen of the next eighteen years! How about that? A Jewish scholar who leads a Muslim army into battle! Cole writes that when Shmuel died at sixty-three, he’d just returned from another military campaign. Do I wish that there’d been a detailed accounting of those battles replete with hacked off limbs, and dramatic acts of daring-do? Of course. But I don’t need it, because I have Shmuel’s exquisite poetry. I have “Jasmine:”
Look at the jasmine, whose branches are green
as topaz, and its stems and leaves –
while its blossoms are white as bdellium.
With canelian red in its shoot
it looks like a pallid boy who’s shedding
the blood of innocent men with his hand. (45)
Even better, I have a poem in which Shmuel and his brother discuss their outrage at those who head the academies of Talmud study – mind you, this from a man who was not only the head of the Jews in Andalusia – Nagid is his title for that role – but an impressive Talmud scholar in his own right. In the poem he attacks the stuffiness of the old fools reciting their prayers. The poem culminates in the following verses:
And the teacher expounded at length,
preying on every sound they made,
and I sat there enraged at the sight,
and my soul grew sad…
I asked the good teacher after his health,
but he answered as a man of strife –
and he started reciting the hundred blessings
in a course voice, like an army or horde,
and he thanked the Lord
who had made him a man and not a woman.
And I told him: “You flaunt your phallic soul,
but the Lord will prove you hollow.” (48)
Shmuel seems to point at a different mode of practice, a spiritual rightness in action, an advocacy for engaging the material world. The final three lines could be read as Shmuel’s rejection the “good teacher’s” manliness, and thus chauvinistic, but I like to think he’s also making a statement about the emptiness of thanking God for having a cock. I like that in an eleventh century poem.
I recently visited Granada and toured the Alhambra. My first instinct was that Europeans had deeply influenced the Moors, and that the Moors had adopted Christian-Europe’s palace-building style: long, pooled courtyards ringed with orange trees and columned, vaulted walkways, impossibly high-ceilinged rooms with secret crannies in which one might imagine a mad Hamlet sequestering a desperate Ophelia, elaborate gardens, towers, dungeons, garrisons. I was wrong. The Alhambra, it turns out, was the blueprint for the Europe. It was where medieval Europe went to learn science, architecture and culture. I imagine Shmuel at the beginning of this compound’s magnificent development, his nights spent in its tight garrisons cramped amongst his soldiers, his days in the elaborate halls of powers.
But this is but a fraction of the book. Spanish Jews invented the Qabbala. And, like any kooky revolutionary religious movement, Qabbalism wasn’t developed in isolation anymore than was its recent celebrity cult following. Would-be mystical messiahs ran rampant through late-Moorish Spain. Who can blame them? The caliphates were losing strength, and infusions of power from North Africa inevitably brought with them fundamentalist restrictiveness. The Christians’ intents were never in question. Dependent upon a repressive failing state for sanctuary from an encroaching, genocidal army, Spain’s Jews quite reasonably hoped for an end-of-days way out. Fortunately, despair and mysticism are potent poetry-inducers.
Take the Qabbalist Yosef Giqatilla, who, granted, lived quite some time before the Reconquista’s success. He found his way to prison, where he continued to write. This is from his prison poems. Goths eat your hearts out:
- As Love Lives
As love lives, fly – O birds – to lovers
with greetings from suffering men, held in the ground,
and tell the world, I beg you, they’re hungry and thirsty,
though bread of their tears and blood of their hearts abound.
They’re cast like unwanted births, deep in dungeons,
where lice and fleas and mosquitoes feast on their flesh,
and tiny creatures that have not names yet jostle
against one another, like lovers in frenzies of lust.
Flies buzz at the bees, the rodents gnaw,
their teeth attacking body and soul exposed –
and jailers and soldiers harry the prisoners, as ordered.
and no one brings them a morsel, not even the crows. (263)
His other prison poems range from threats based in God’s avenging power to despair at God’s abandonment.
Of course this is but a tiny sampling from a 540-page book. I love this book because it makes me want to live in Moorish Spain. It makes me wish – I think justifiably – that the Reconquista had failed. When I read it, I want to be Shmuel HaNagid
