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."

The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation) PDF

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