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The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492
Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies an extraordinary sensuality and intense faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time. Peter Cole's translations reveal this remarkable poetic world to English readers in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. The Dream of the Poem traces the arc of the entire period, presenting some four hundred poems by fifty-four poets, and including a panoramic historical introduction, short biographies of each poet, and extensive notes. (The original Hebrew texts are available on the Princeton University Press Web site.) By far the most potent and comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poems ever assembled in English, Cole's anthology builds on what poet and translator Richard Howard has described as "the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years" and "an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us." The Dream of the Poem is, Howard says, "a crowning achievement."
576 pages, Paperback
First published January 2, 2007
About the author
Peter Cole
150 books26 followersPeter Cole has published several books of poems and many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic, both medieval and modern. He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and in 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 17, 2026
Somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, a civilization decided to throw a party on the Iberian Peninsula, and the guest list included Jews, Muslims, and Christians in an arrangement so improbable that posterity christened it "convivencia," which is Spanish for "everyone eventually stops getting along." Peter Cole's "The Dream of the Poem" is the crash course in what those five centuries of coexistence, persecution, exile, and fitful genius produced. A corpus of Hebrew verse so unexpected, so charged with Arabic meters and biblical vocabulary, that the great historian S. D. Goitein required three words to describe it. "The Spanish miracle" was his verdict.
A Moroccan poet named Dunash Ben Labrat hauled the new prosody west from Baghdad to Cordoba in a trunk of revolutionary poetic strategies, was accused of destroying the holy tongue, displaced the reigning court poet, and then left town under obscure circumstances, abandoning a wife whose single surviving poem asks whether her husband would accept half a kingdom to stay in Spain.
He would not, and the tradition he ignited burned on without him.
Shmuel HaNagid wrote war poems from actual battlefields and wine poems from actual gardens, sometimes within the same week.
Shelomo Ibn Gabirol declared himself prince to the poem at the tender age of sixteen and proceeded to treat God as his most demanding patron.
Moshe Ibn Ezra spent the second half of his life in the Christian north, lamenting the Andalusian refinement he had lost, composing lyrics of immaculate bittersweet melancholy.
Yehuda HaLevi longed so publicly for Zion that his erotic verse and his theological yearning became, in Cole's translations, two registers of the same relentless desire.
Avraham Ibn Ezra wore a cloak with so many holes he could see Orion through it and wrote chess poems, fly poems, and patron-complaint poems.
Cole gathers fifty-four poets across two periods, Muslim Spain and Christian Spain, with a detour through Provence, and the anthology's arc follows the slow southward dimming of the Umayyad caliphate and the long, grinding northward migration of the Jews who survived it.
Almohad invasions scatter the Golden Age's inheritors. Inquisition pressures reshape the poetry of the Christian centuries. Todros Abulafia writes from a Castilian prison. Shelomo Bonafed catalogs a world gone wrong. The Expulsion of 1492 waits at the anthology's edge, and the poems up to that threshold carry the full weight of what was about to be lost, in a language the poets had bent, at enormous cost, into something wholly their own.
Five centuries of Hebrew verse in Iberia represent a genuine miracle of cultural cross-pollination, in which Jewish poets absorbed Neoplatonic philosophy, and the erotic conventions of Bedouin verse, then grafted all of it onto biblical Hebrew to produce something that belonged fully to two civilizations and exclusively to one. The miracle was also a paradox. To find their most original voice, these poets had to risk losing it entirely to the foreign.
Let man remember throughout his life
he’s on his way toward death:
each day he travels only a little
so thinks he’s always at rest—
like someone sitting at ease on a ship
while the wind sweeps it over the depths.
-Ibn Ezra
My hips hurt so much, I fear,
that I can neither see nor hear.
The pain today was the worst I’ve known—
like a woman’s giving birth on stones.
As Scripture, O my Lord, enjoins:
“Sigh for the breaking of my loins.”
-Shelomo Depiera
They contend against me for having abandoned the Lord’s covenant for godless injustice
— but Amram’s son in anger destroyed the Law’s tablets in his disgust.
And the Lion, Judah, went to Tamar,
and Amnon to his sister, a virgin;
and David was tried by the Lord and erred beside Bathsheba,
Like Delilah’s Samson.
I never tasted impure food, I always thought it a rotting carcass—
and if I tell you, “The Prophet’s mad,” but acknowledge him with every blessing,
my mouth speaks, but my heart replies:
“You’re lying again, and bearing false witness.”
I’ve sought the shadow of the Presence’s wing
and ask of you now, my Lord, forgiveness.
-Yitzhaq Ibn Ezra
❤️ 🇮🇱
A Moroccan poet named Dunash Ben Labrat hauled the new prosody west from Baghdad to Cordoba in a trunk of revolutionary poetic strategies, was accused of destroying the holy tongue, displaced the reigning court poet, and then left town under obscure circumstances, abandoning a wife whose single surviving poem asks whether her husband would accept half a kingdom to stay in Spain.
He would not, and the tradition he ignited burned on without him.
Shmuel HaNagid wrote war poems from actual battlefields and wine poems from actual gardens, sometimes within the same week.
Shelomo Ibn Gabirol declared himself prince to the poem at the tender age of sixteen and proceeded to treat God as his most demanding patron.
Moshe Ibn Ezra spent the second half of his life in the Christian north, lamenting the Andalusian refinement he had lost, composing lyrics of immaculate bittersweet melancholy.
Yehuda HaLevi longed so publicly for Zion that his erotic verse and his theological yearning became, in Cole's translations, two registers of the same relentless desire.
Avraham Ibn Ezra wore a cloak with so many holes he could see Orion through it and wrote chess poems, fly poems, and patron-complaint poems.
Cole gathers fifty-four poets across two periods, Muslim Spain and Christian Spain, with a detour through Provence, and the anthology's arc follows the slow southward dimming of the Umayyad caliphate and the long, grinding northward migration of the Jews who survived it.
Almohad invasions scatter the Golden Age's inheritors. Inquisition pressures reshape the poetry of the Christian centuries. Todros Abulafia writes from a Castilian prison. Shelomo Bonafed catalogs a world gone wrong. The Expulsion of 1492 waits at the anthology's edge, and the poems up to that threshold carry the full weight of what was about to be lost, in a language the poets had bent, at enormous cost, into something wholly their own.
Five centuries of Hebrew verse in Iberia represent a genuine miracle of cultural cross-pollination, in which Jewish poets absorbed Neoplatonic philosophy, and the erotic conventions of Bedouin verse, then grafted all of it onto biblical Hebrew to produce something that belonged fully to two civilizations and exclusively to one. The miracle was also a paradox. To find their most original voice, these poets had to risk losing it entirely to the foreign.
Let man remember throughout his life
he’s on his way toward death:
each day he travels only a little
so thinks he’s always at rest—
like someone sitting at ease on a ship
while the wind sweeps it over the depths.
-Ibn Ezra
My hips hurt so much, I fear,
that I can neither see nor hear.
The pain today was the worst I’ve known—
like a woman’s giving birth on stones.
As Scripture, O my Lord, enjoins:
“Sigh for the breaking of my loins.”
-Shelomo Depiera
They contend against me for having abandoned the Lord’s covenant for godless injustice
— but Amram’s son in anger destroyed the Law’s tablets in his disgust.
And the Lion, Judah, went to Tamar,
and Amnon to his sister, a virgin;
and David was tried by the Lord and erred beside Bathsheba,
Like Delilah’s Samson.
I never tasted impure food, I always thought it a rotting carcass—
and if I tell you, “The Prophet’s mad,” but acknowledge him with every blessing,
my mouth speaks, but my heart replies:
“You’re lying again, and bearing false witness.”
I’ve sought the shadow of the Presence’s wing
and ask of you now, my Lord, forgiveness.
-Yitzhaq Ibn Ezra
❤️ 🇮🇱
December 18, 2007
this sweeping anthology of the hebrew poetry of medieval spain is one of most important books of translation i've ever read. summary does it an injustice. the music and force of the translation, the reach of the scholarship which provides a kind of ground tone against which the variations of individual authors can be read, and that larger feeling as one reads that one is stumbling, line by line, into a new world, heretofore glimpsed only in embalmed academic translations and never before seen en toto, provides something thrilling and rare.
June 3, 2012
A very good collection of the great Hebrew poets and writers who emerged from the flowering of Jewish culture in Medieval Spain. A nice sampling of important figures of Kabbalah, philosophy, and culture, like Hanagid, ibn Gabirol, Halevi, Abulafia, and many more.
Read
March 31, 2023"
The beds of our friendship are rich with it,
planted by the river of affection,
and fixed like a seal in wax,
like graven gold
in the windowed dome of the temple.
May YAH be with you as you love,
and your soul which He loves be delived,
and the God who sends salvation shield you
till the sun and moor are no more."
- 'On fleeing his city'
Samuel Hanagid
"She said: “Be happy that God has helped you reach
The age of fifty in this world,” not knowing
That to me there is no difference between my life’s
Past and that of Noah about whom I heard.
For me there is only the hour in which I am present in this world:
It stays for a moment and then like a cloud moves on."
- 'Be glad'
Samuel Hanagid
"Run where you will.
Heaven surrounds you.
Get out while you can."
- 'Earth to Man'
"I'd give up my soul itself for one
whose light is like the sun:
He softly entreated me, saying: "Drink,
and banish your grief and longing--"
the wine poured from the beaker's spout
a viper in the mouth of a griffon.
And I answered him: "Could one contain the sun
within a jar that's broken?"
But my heart didn't yet know of its power
to utterly crush its burden--
which was lying safe and secure inside it,
like the king on his bed in Bashan."
'I'd give up my Soul Itself'
-Ibn Gabirol
The beds of our friendship are rich with it,
planted by the river of affection,
and fixed like a seal in wax,
like graven gold
in the windowed dome of the temple.
May YAH be with you as you love,
and your soul which He loves be delived,
and the God who sends salvation shield you
till the sun and moor are no more."
- 'On fleeing his city'
Samuel Hanagid
"She said: “Be happy that God has helped you reach
The age of fifty in this world,” not knowing
That to me there is no difference between my life’s
Past and that of Noah about whom I heard.
For me there is only the hour in which I am present in this world:
It stays for a moment and then like a cloud moves on."
- 'Be glad'
Samuel Hanagid
"Run where you will.
Heaven surrounds you.
Get out while you can."
- 'Earth to Man'
"I'd give up my soul itself for one
whose light is like the sun:
He softly entreated me, saying: "Drink,
and banish your grief and longing--"
the wine poured from the beaker's spout
a viper in the mouth of a griffon.
And I answered him: "Could one contain the sun
within a jar that's broken?"
But my heart didn't yet know of its power
to utterly crush its burden--
which was lying safe and secure inside it,
like the king on his bed in Bashan."
'I'd give up my Soul Itself'
-Ibn Gabirol
July 2, 2025
Peter Cole's translations are really acts of transposition: they are their own poetry, connected with a silk thread inexorably to the original but only just. This is not a complaint but a compliment. I usually only look at others' translations of medieval Hebrew poems to compare with my own, but with Cole's work, there is great aesthetic pleasure in experiencing his transposed poems, with their own, modern ethos. You will experience the medieval poems anew, adding to your understanding and interpretation of them.
November 30, 2023
legendary
Read
December 2, 2011I was inspired to read this by a friend who is investigating the life and times of Avroham Ibn Ezra (one of the poets featured in this book). She has told me stories about exploring some of the French locations where he lived and studied in the middle ages that have been totally built over. So these pieces of European Jewish history which were then places of worship and study are now basements.
Reading through this compilation of poets from Spain and Southern France was magical. Peter Cole offers little glimpses into the life of the poets and that combined with their original works makes this inspiring time for Jewish poetry come alive. It is invigorating to see images from Jewish liturgy used in many of these poems- giving those symbols added vibrance. Plus, getting a glance into the internal conflicts and personal observations of some of these Jewish poets is like a trip in a time machine. And there were a handful of homoerotic poems that I am still trying to contextualize.
Reading through this compilation of poets from Spain and Southern France was magical. Peter Cole offers little glimpses into the life of the poets and that combined with their original works makes this inspiring time for Jewish poetry come alive. It is invigorating to see images from Jewish liturgy used in many of these poems- giving those symbols added vibrance. Plus, getting a glance into the internal conflicts and personal observations of some of these Jewish poets is like a trip in a time machine. And there were a handful of homoerotic poems that I am still trying to contextualize.
April 12, 2010
So, it will take me forever to finish this anthology. Because I won't. But skipping around in my usual way has yielded many gems. I'm giving it three stars though, because the notes seem a little misogynist at times. Check this and marvel:
My strength isn't fading, my branch is green
my words are fresh, my lines are lithe;
my soul sings, as breezes of song
across my fields are sent by the Lord.
For God works through me and so He created
a tongue that speaks and a hand that records.
--Vidal Benveniste, 14th century
My strength isn't fading, my branch is green
my words are fresh, my lines are lithe;
my soul sings, as breezes of song
across my fields are sent by the Lord.
For God works through me and so He created
a tongue that speaks and a hand that records.
--Vidal Benveniste, 14th century
September 22, 2015
An extra-ordinary book. I've been dipping in and out since it arrived and while I haven't read everything it's perfect for someone like myself who knows nothing about the subject. Each poet has an introduction and a sampling of poems. IF the test of a good translation is the production of poems that work in English, as poems, then the skill of the translator is obvious.
It's impossible not to compare these with the kind of poems being produced in English during the same period. They belong to such different worlds.
It's impossible not to compare these with the kind of poems being produced in English during the same period. They belong to such different worlds.
October 22, 2013
Cole's translation is excellent; the English translations are fluid and creative. This book of poetry spans 500 years of Spanish poets writing about religion, love, God, and everyday life. Some verses sound like they could be from the Psalms.
February 14, 2008
great translations of great poetry--- i especially recommend Shmuel Hanagid, the Prince,....
June 26, 2011
Lyrical. Impressive mastery of intricate medieval poetical arts. Translation renders the poems into a contemporary idiom understandable by all. Truly unique!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews