{"id":12912,"date":"2011-03-16T10:00:40","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T14:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=12912"},"modified":"2011-03-16T14:21:02","modified_gmt":"2011-03-16T18:21:02","slug":"peter-cole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/16\/peter-cole\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spring Issue: Peter Cole"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

The spring issue<\/a> of <\/em>The Paris Review includes five poems of Kabbalah translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole<\/a>. Cole has translated several volumes of poetry, including <\/em>The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950\u20131492<\/a> and Aharon Shabtai’s<\/em> War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems<\/a>. <\/em>His most recent book of poems is<\/em> Things on Which I\u2019ve Stumbled<\/a>, and <\/em>Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza<\/a>, a book of nonfiction written with his wife, Adina Hoffman, was just released by Schocken\/Nextbook.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never read poems quite like these\u2014wild yet severe, also a little bit unearthly. Can you give some context for understanding them? What is their relation to Kabbalah?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The anthology these poems are drawn from\u2014The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition<\/em>, forthcoming from Yale\u2014covers some fifteen hundred years, and the poems emerge from diverse varieties of Jewish mystical thought and practice: Palestine of Late Antiquity, the eleventh- and twelfth-century Jewish communities of Muslim Spain and medieval Germany, and, later on, Christian Spain, Ottoman Palestine, Yemen, North Africa, Italy, and Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

By and large, Jewish mystics were preoccupied with other masochistic pleasures (rolling in nettles, fasting and wearing sackcloth, observing turbocharged versions of the traditional commandments, et cetera), so there isn\u2019t a great deal of Kabbalistic poetry. But the best of it epitomizes an extraordinarily potent if lesser-known aspect of Judaism. That wild severity and otherworldliness you describe reflects the history of Jewish esotericism through the ages, some of which is in fact shockingly mythic, intricate, erotic, and often just plain weird.<\/p>\n

What drew you to this body of poetry, as a reader, poet, and translator?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For one, its sheer potency and the steepness of its metaphysical ambition. Contemporary literary culture tends to doubt the power of poetry and is suspicious of verse that takes as its subject its own medium. But hymns treating nothing less than the nature of creation and the language that leads to that creation lie at the heart of the heart of Kabbalah\u2019s country. So that drew me. The Kabbalists thought that song could, among many other things, extract light from the container of sound and bring about erotic union within the cosmic forces on high. That definitely got my attention. I was also drawn by the way in which Kabbalistic literature (the term kabbalah<\/em> means \u201ctradition\u201d or, more literally, \u201creception\u201d or \u201creceptivity\u201d) depicts a literary situation of acute authorial susceptibility to the interaction of words\u2014sonic, semantic, architectonic. In short, the poetry of Kabbalah pressed a lot of my literary buttons.<\/p>\n

The first poem of the selection, \u201cFrom the Sky to the Heavens\u2019 Heaven,\u201d certainly has no doubts about the power of poetry. When I read it out loud I can\u2019t help but feel it\u2019s a poem to be chanted or sung. Who is the poet, Yannai, and what sort of occasion was this poem intended for?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yannai is a titanic poet whose incredible story Adina and I tell in some detail in Sacred Trash<\/em>. He\u2019s one of the major liturgical Hebrew poets of Byzantine Palestine, and his work overlaps with the Christian hymnology of the day. The some eight hundred poems that now make up his oeuvre were lost for nearly a thousand years, during which time he was known primarily as the author of one hymn in the Passover Haggadah and, more notoriously, for reportedly murdering his star pupil, another poet, by placing a scorpion in his sandal. Like Bach writing cantatas for churchgoers in Leipzig, Yannai composed \u201cFrom the Sky to the Heavens\u2019 Heaven\u201d and numerous other works on commission for a synagogue in late sixth- or early seventh-century Palestine. It seems that symphonic works of this sort were meant to intensify the experience of prayer for worshippers by \u201cmaking new\u201d both their devotion and their understanding of the weekly reading from scripture, which the poems gloss in a highly eccentric way. (This particular poem is spun out of Yannai\u2019s \u201ccommentary\u201d on the Tower of Babel story.) Some scholars say the hymns were originally intended not only to ornament the standard liturgy, but to replace it.<\/p>\n

In any event, the \u201cperformance\u201d of these poems apparently drew large crowds. And as you note, they were almost certainly sung\u2014perhaps with a chorus or with the congregation chiming in.<\/p>\n

What you say about making it new reminds me of the third poem, an extract from The Book of Creation<\/em>, which seems to be a rewrite of Genesis or maybe of John 1:1 (\u201cIn the beginning was the Word\u201d). The poem\u2019s representation of God\u2014if that\u2019s who He is\u2014is very physical, almost demiurgic: he carves and quarries and weighs… <\/strong><\/p>\n

The Book of Creation<\/em> (or Formation<\/em>) does constitute a revolutionary, imaginative line of Jewish thought. It\u2019s a bizarre and not altogether fathomable work, and we know almost nothing about its author or the circumstances of its composition. But one thing that seems clear is that it amounts to an ars poetica, where the \u201cmade thing,\u201d the product of poesis, is the world itself. God in this scheme constructs through language, which is to say that the cosmos is a literary creation. Working on this excerpt I kept thinking of The Book of Creation<\/em>, anachronistically, as a radically theological inflection of what Ezra Pound said was the poet\u2019s central task: to build a world.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve already translated several volumes of medieval Hebrew verse. Did these Kabbalistic poems offer special difficulties to you as a translator?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Their abstraction was a challenge, as was the almost total absence, in the early work, of what we think of now as a personal voice. The Poetry of the Palaces<\/em>\u2014and many other selections in the anthology\u2014present a verse that\u2019s rooted in the magical power of letters and words, their shapes, sounds, and the cadences they create in combination. Experience in this literature is acoustic and rhythmic rather than psychological in the conventional sense, though this doesn\u2019t mean that emotional struggle, growth, and insight aren\u2019t at its core. Central to the quest that drives these poems is the verse\u2019s ability to animate abstract understanding, to set up a palpable, percussive current that links syllable to syllable and word to word in a progression that leads toward heightened perception and, sometimes, a kind of ecstasy. But I\u2019ve always been drawn to a tactile sort of abstraction in the arts, and to a poetry that does intense and impassioned work beyond narrow definitions of the self. So, if anything, these difficulties just made the challenge all the more enticing.<\/p>\n

The absence of a personal voice is striking in the second poem, \u201cTo Rise on High,\u201d which has a lot of verbs in the infinitive but no subject. What\u2019s going on there?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Your guess is as good as mine. But I do love that poem.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the last poem of the group, \u201cBring Me in Under Your Wing,\u201d by Bialik, uses a voice that sounds more or less familiar. What happens when Kabbalah collides with modern lyricism?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The anthology defines the term kabbalah<\/em> broadly, so that it includes a lot of poetry that is, shall we say, proto-Kabbalistic. (Kabbalah proper begins in late twelfth-century Languedoc.) By the time we get to the final poet in the book, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, we\u2019re into what I think of as a kind of secular mysticism, where the vestiges of a popular Kabbalism inform modern Hebrew writers, in this case one who writes in a Russian-influenced neo-Romantic tradition. But Bialik is just the first rumble of the eruption of poems that ensues from that conjunction, or collision, of Kabbalah and the conventions of modern lyricism.<\/p>\n

Were there any English verse models you found helpful while working on your translations?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say. In the translations of the early medieval work I let the Hebrew have its way with me and with English, and there were no particular models, at least none that I was conscious of. Elsewhere in the anthology, all sorts of poetries hover further off in the wings: at least one of the poems has a gust, or ghost, of Wordsworth in its sails, and if pressed I suppose I could identify distant echoes of the middle English and early English Renaissance lyric, Blake, the metaphysicals and Hopkins, occasionally Whitman, maybe Stephen Crane and certainly Hart Crane, even Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. Reception is reception.<\/p>\n

Interested in reading more? Purchase the spring issue<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The spring issue of The Paris Review includes five poems of Kabbalah translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole. Cole has translated several volumes of poetry, including The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950\u20131492 and Aharon Shabtai’s War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems. His most recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1986,1990,1835,1989,1988,165,278,426,1991],"class_list":["post-12912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-1986","tag-adina-hoffman","tag-issue-196","tag-kabbalah","tag-peter-cole","tag-poetry","tag-robyn-creswell","tag-the-paris-review","tag-the-poetry-of-kabbalah-mystical-verse-from-the-jewish-tradition"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Spring Issue: Peter Cole by Robyn Creswell<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 16, 2011 \u2013 The spring issue of The Paris Review includes five poems of Kabbalah translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole. 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