Yehuda Halevi Nine Poems Yehuda Halevi (c. 1075–1141) was the Hebrew poet who culminated the startling period of Andalusian cultural production that Jewish history calls the Golden Age. In a moment of symbiosis in Islamic Spain from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries, Hebrew poetry flowered as it had not since the Bible and would not again until the modern era. A courtier-rabbi class arose serving Muslim rulers, steeped in their Arabic language and culture. The men of this new Jewish elite adapted Arabic poetics to Hebrew, including quantitative meters and a purist approach to the lexicon, while adopting Arab poetry’s embrace of secular alongside religious verse. Halevi was born on the frontier between al-Andalus and Castille, possibly in Tudela, while it was still under Muslim control. As a teenager he went south to Granada, where he rose to prominence as one of the finest Hebrew poets of the age. In addition to over eight hundred extant religious and secular poems, he wrote (in Arabic) The Kuzari, an important work of Jewish philosophy that challenged the rationalism that was ascendant in the Jewish thought of the period. He was also a successful physician and merchant who moved, in the increasing political instability of the period, between a number of communities, including Lucena, Seville, and Christian Toledo. Late in his life Halevi repudiated Andalusian cosmopolitanism and prepared for a rare and dangerous pilgrimage to Palestine, which he undertook shortly before he died. His poems from this period are known as his Shirei Tzion (Songs of Zion), and they reflect the “mystical geography” (in Hillel Halkin’s phrase) laid out in The Kuzari, which holds the Land of Israel as the site of utmost Jewish holiness. While many modern thinkers have claimed this work of Halevi’s as proto-Zionism, it resists such retroactive categorization. The scholar Raymond Scheindlin has argued persuasively that Halevi was following the period’s Islamic pattern of the mutawakkil, an ascetic withdrawal from society and dramatic altering of one’s life. 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 wordplay. It is also written within elaborate formal constraints in a Biblical Hebrew which layers it with intertextual references to that canon (as well as the contemporary Arabic poetry on which it is modeled). It thus presents an extreme case of the inadequacy of translation in general. My particular focus as a translator is on the sound, or what poets like to call the music, of this poetry. As a poet reading these poems I experience above all an utter reveling in the materiality of language. My goal is to create versions that approach some of this sonic richness. In this light I have chosen the music over form and precision of content. I aim to render this music as immediate as possible, and so I sometimes adapt archaic images and terms to ones with more resonance in contemporary language. Dan Alter [Beloved did you forget . . . ] Beloved did you forget how you slept between my breasts & why have you sold me forever into chains Didn’t I chase after you once in an untamed land Mountains & sand, Dead Sea & Sinai my witnesses You had my love & I was your desire, so how Can you share out my riches without me? Pushed into Seir, forced toward Kedar, Turned in the furnace of Greece, abused in the bond of Iran Who besides you could set me free Who but me, so caged by hope? Lend me your strength, I will give you my tenderness [Oh homeland don’t you wonder] Oh homeland don’t you wonder on your captives, who call to you, the ones left of your pastures From seaward to sunrise, tree-line to barrens, calling from far or close by from all sides Call of a captive of desire, who sheds tears like dew on Hermon’s peaks, & longs to let them fall on your mountains When I wail out your torment I’m a hound, & when I dream your homecoming has come, I’m strung with your songs My heart beats to Beth-El & louder at P’niel & Makhanayim & every point your pure ones touched Where the holy nearness filled your winds, your maker opened your windows to the windows of skies & only God’s glow for your light, no sun moon or stars to illuminate you I would let my last breath spill out right where the divine spirit overflowed your chosen ones You’re the royal home & the holy seat & how have servants sat down on your heroes’ thrones? If only I could wander in the places God was shown to your envoys & seers & who will make me wings & I will range with my heart in pieces between your ragged peaks I would fall to my face on your ground & thrill to your stones & feel your sweet dust with my fingers & then standing on my ancestors’ gravestones, I’d be stunned in Hevron how your finest are buried there I would cross your forests & terraces & pause in awe at the Gilead ridgeline where Moses was buried His & Aaron’s burial mountains, those two huge lights shining on you, showing you the way Living breath — the air of your soil, & myrrh fragrance the grains your earth, & honey-flow for your rivers It would soothe my mind to go shoeless, naked in the waste & ruins that were your shrines Where your ark was hidden away, where cherubim stayed in your innermost chambers I’d shear off my hair grown in devotion, curse the years in unclean lands that fouled your most devoted How fine can the food on my plate taste when I see your young lions dragged along by dogs? Or how will daylight sweeten my eyes, while
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