>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
[ Pause ]
>> Rob Casper: Hello and welcome to the Library of Congress.
I'm Rob Casper.
I'm the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here
at the Library of Congress.
And I'm thrilled to be welcoming you here today to celebrate 100 Years
of Hebrew Poetry with our great, great reader, Peter Cole.
I'm just going to say a few words before I introduce the Chief
of the African Middle Eastern Division, Mary-Jane Deeb.
I'd like to thank Mary-Jane and thank Peggy Pearlstein
who runs the Hebraic section and who will get up to introduce Mr. Cole
for putting this program together.
I'd like to thank Peter Cole himself for his hard work getting here.
He and I both came down from New York recently,
and I'm happy to be here myself.
The Poetry and Literature Center has done a lot of work with the African
and Middle Eastern Division co-sponsoring programs.
I'm proud to say that we have a series called Conversations
with African Poets and Writers.
And our next event is actually coming
up this Wednesday in this very room.   Anna Malago will be here.

So if you're interested please come.   It's at noon.

If you want to find out more about the events that we do you can go
to www.loc.gov/poetry and sign up for our list serve.
We have a Friday event as well.
But this is a great kickoff to our week of Ahmed co-sponsor readings,
the first time we've done anything with the Hebraic section.
And a great way to not only celebrate our partnership but also
to celebrate the great exhibit that this event came out of.
So without further ado let me introduce Mary-Jane Deeb,
and she will tell you more about Ahmed.
Thank you.   [ Pause ]

>> Mary-Jane Deeb: Thank you, Rob.   And good afternoon everyone.

And I would like to welcome you to the African
and Middle Eastern Division's reading room.
I'm Mary-Jane Deeb, and I'm delighted to be able to host you
in our room for what promises to be a fascinating program.
A big thanks to Rob Casper and to Peggy Pearlstein
for having put together this program.
And thank you, Peter, for having come all the way despite the storms
and everything to be with us today.
As most of you already know our division is made
up of three sections, the Hebraic, the African
and the Near East sections.
We are responsible for materials from 78 different countries
in the Near East, Central Asia, the [inaudible] as well
as from the entire continent of Africa, North and Sub Saharan.
Our Hebraic and Judaic collections come from all over the world.
We also serve these materials to patrons here in our reading room
and organize programs, exhibits, and now we have the exhibit
and please go and visit it.
It's fabulous on the same floor on the Hebrew book.

And we also hold conferences and other activities
that highlight our collections, and that inform our patrons
about the countries and the cultures these publications come from.
And our presentation today is a case in point.
Peter Cole is a poet and anthologist who will present a program
on 100 Years of Hebrew Poetry.
Poetry is an essential part of any culture.
It is at the root of all civilization.
There is no people without poetry.
It is a quintessential way of communicating ideas, values,
feelings that cannot be expressed in any other format.
And here to introduce our guest today is Dr. Peggy Pearlstein,
the head of the Hebraic section.   [ Pause ]

>> Peggy Pearlstein: Thank you, Mary-Jane.
Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to today's program with poet,
translator and anthologist Peter Cole.
We're so privileged to have Mr. Cole with us today.
And I'm looking forward to hearing him read from his books
and to hear more from him about Hebrew poetry past and present.
Peter Cole's most recent book published by Yale University Press
in April is The Poetry of Kabbalah, Mystical Verse
From the Jewish Tradition.
He's authored three books of poems, the most recent
of which is Things On Which I Stumble.
His volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include the Dream
of the Poem; Hebrew Poetry from Muslin and Christian Spain,
950 to 1492; Aharon Shabtai's War & Love, Love & War,
New and Selected Poems; Taha Muhammad Ali's So What,
New and Selected Poems, 1973 to 2005,
and he's also edited Hebrew Writers on Writing.
In 2001 he wrote with Adina Hoffman, his wife, who's here today.
2011 he wrote with his wife Adina Hoffman Sacred Trash, the Lost
and Found World of the Cairo Geniza.
Peter Cole has received many honors for his work including Fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
He's received a National Jewish Book Award for Poetry,
the PEN Translation Award for Poetry,
the American Library Association's Brody Medal for the Jewish Book
of the Year, and in 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven,
co-edits the Jerusalem Publishing House ibis editions,
and most currently teaches at Yale University.
I'd like to let you know that tomorrow, same time right here
in our reading room, we have a program with Irvin Ungar
who will be talking about the American Art of Arthur Szyk,
and he selected that topic because tomorrow is election day.
If you'd like to be put on our email list
for programs please let us know afterwards.
And you can also check our website for upcoming programs.
Following Mr. Cole's reading
and talk we will welcome questions from the audience.
This event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcast
from the Library's website and other media.
The audience is encouraged to offer comments
and raise questions during the formal question and answer period
that follows the poetry reading.
But please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded
and later broadcast as part of this event.
By participating in the question and answer period, you're consenting
to the Library's possible reproduction
and transmission of your remarks.
And following the Q and A we will have a book sale
and signing in the rear of the room.   And now Peter Cole.

[ Applause ]
>> Peter Cole: Thank you, Peggy and Mary-Jane.
Thank you all for coming.   A little order here.

So today's program is a bit of a hodgepodge.
Can you hear me okay back there?
Yeah? And basically we put it together.
Peggy sent me the list of items that are
in the exhibit across the way there.
And 100 Years of Hebrew Poetry was the topic that was assigned.
But we didn't agree on which 100 years
of Hebrew poetry I would talk about.
[Laughter] And since I translate from really early post typical work
up until the present, I've put together a program that ranges
over the history of Hebrew poetry.
Altogether in my secret tally there will be 100 years of Hebrew poetry,
but it's going to jump all over the place.
The organizing principle is also kind of, let's say, eccentric.
I've tried to pick poems that I've translated or written myself,
in one case, that match something in the exhibit.
But usually the correlation between, or not always,
but often the correlation between the item and the exhibit
and the poem will, let's say, be a little oblique.
Okay? So that will keep everybody on their toes.
I don't know how many of you have seen the exhibit,
but I'll describe briefly the item in question
so you can also go look at it afterwards.
The first thing I'm going to read is based on an item
that is 17th century I believe.   Let me see what we have here.


Right. It is a Latin treatise
by a 17th century Belgian philosopher who is writing
about the fact that Hebrew is often considered in Hebrew literature
and Christian literature also the language that Adam and Eve spoke,
the natural language of mankind.
And, therefore, and here's one of the kind
of curious things among many curious things you're about to hear,
therefore this Belgian philosopher thought
that because it's the natural language it could be used
to help the hearing impaired learn to speak.
And in this book that is on display across the way, he has diagrams
of where all the Hebrew sounds are made in the throat and in the mouth.
This Belgian philosopher was a mystic or was interested
in Jewish mysticism, and lo and behold it turns out that one
of the earliest Jewish mystical texts from approximately,
we don't know when, approximately the 2nd century CE, the common era,
possibly after the 9th century, a book called the Book of Creation
or the Book of Formation, this book deals explicitly with the sounds
of Hebrew, where they are in the mouth and in the throat.
And the notion behind it all is that this is kind
of a mystical Book of Genesis.
When God wanted to create the universe He did it
by combining two basic things.
First, ten primal channels of creation which are based
on the Pythagorean numbers, He combined those
with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Those two things, the letters and the numbers together was enough
to create an entire universe.
And that powers of the letters, of the Hebrew letter in particular,
but Jewish mystics would say all letters of all alphabets that runs
through the heart of Jewish mysticism and even
through normative Judaism to a certain extent.
So I'm going to start with an excerpt from this Book of Creation,
Sefer Yetzirah, also can be translated as the Book of Formation.
And in reading, and when I first went to translate it I thought
of Ezra Pound has a comment in a letter to a younger poet
at one point, and he says that the poet's primary task is
to build a world.
And in this mystical book this is God's primary task is
to build a world, and man imitates God by doing the same.
So it's pretty strange, but this is what it sounds like.
Probably written in the land of Israel,
or some people think in Babylonia.   Again, we don't know.

Through 32 hidden paths of wisdom, yah,
the Lord of Hosts engraved His name, the Lord of Israel, Living God
and King of the World, merciful gracious God Almighty, on high
and dwelling in eternity, His name is Holy and He is sublime
and created His world out of three words, sefer, sephar,
sippur, letter, limit and tale.
Ten spheres of restraint whose measure is ten without end,
a depth before and a depth behind, a benevolent depth and a depth
that harms, a depth on high and a depth on low, an eastern depth,
a depth to the west, a northern depth and the southern depth,
the single Lord and faithful master reigning over all from the dwelling
of his sanctity into eternity.
Ten spheres of restraint, the site like lightening,
their reach without end, and his word within them runs and returns,
His speech they pursue like a storm,
and before His thrown they bow ten spheres of restraint,
their end contained in their beginning,
the beginning within their end like coals in a lambent flame.
For the Lord is one and there is no other before one,
what would you number?   Twenty two letters to start with.

Engraved, quarried and wade, exchange and combined,
and with them formed all the creation and all
that He was destined to fashion.
Twenty two letters carved through voice, quarried in air and fixed
in the mouth in five positions.
Certain sounds in the throat, certain sounds on the lips,
certain sounds against the palate and others against the teeth
and others still along the tongue, twenty two letters fixed
like a wheel in a wall with 231 doors, the wheel whirs back
and forth and the sign bearing its witness is no good is greater
than [inaudible] pleasure.
No evil greater than naga plague, how did he combine,
weigh and exchange them [inaudible] with all and all
with [inaudible] bet with all and all with bet.
Over and over and on again through 231 gates with every creature
and also speech issuing from a single name.
He created substance from nothing, from absence, making what there is.
Hew hue tremendous columns out of air that can't be grasped,
combining, exchanging and fashioning all of creation, and every locution
within a single name, and a sign bearing its witness is twenty two
long for things in a single body bound from here
on in consider what a mouth can't utter and what the ear can't hear.

So that's kind of a mystical opening to go with his book
on how Hebrew can help the hearing impaired.
If there's a theme apart from the correlation of what I'm going
to read, apart from the correlation to the exhibit,
I'm trying to read you things that give you a sense of what it is
that Hebrew can do and has done over history.
Especially when Hebrew is pushing its own limits,
going to the very edge of what Hebrew had done before that.
So in a sense we'll see Hebrew pushing the envelope.
The next poem I want to read jumps far ahead into the 10th century.
These are vastly different periods of Jewish history.
Now we're going to go to Muslim Spain, period of Muslim Spain.
Muslims ruled in Iberia, created a kind of renaissance
where Cordoba was the equivalent of a rival of Baghdad in the east,
and Jews for a certain period, a century and a half,
as Christians also lived under Islamic rule
with a considerable measure of freedom.
And they created their own literary renaissance,
their own humanistic renaissance very much in emulation
of the Arab renaissance of the day.
And, in fact, so sort of deep seeded was the Hebrew and Jewish emulation
of Islamic culture that Hebrew poets began seemingly out of the blue,
although lately we've come to see,
scholars have showed us how there's a much more organic process at work,
Hebrew poets began in the middle of the 10th century to write very much
in the Arabic style copying everything that Arab poets had done
for the last 100, 150 years.
Using their meters and their rhyme schemes
and their tropes and their images.
But the big difference they were writing in Hebrew,
the original language, the originary language, Jewish scripture.
And they were using the entire sort of Jewish mytho-poetic imagination.
Those were the two big things.
So they made this kind of perfect graft between Hebrew and Arabic
that created a stunning poetry.
I would argue that the best of it is as good as anything ever written
in Hebrew including the poetry of the Hebrew Bible.
And that poetry is as a merge in the 10th century.
One of the most surprising items of that Hebrew poetry emerged very,
very early in the period, again middle of the 10th century.
There's a book, an artist's book, that's on display here that is based
on the Hebrew and my translation.
And this is a poem that -- Peggy mentioned Sacred Trash,
the book I wrote with my wife Adina Hoffman.
This is a poem that was actually found
in this trash heap called the Cairo Geniza.
I won't go into what that whole story, it will take too long.
But basically at a certain point a scholar, this is in the 1930s,
1940s, a scholar found a piece of paper in this collection
of documents, of sort of trash heap of documents in Cairo,
and the paper was ripped down the middle vertically.
And on the right side you could see, was it the right side
of the poem or the left side?
I can't remember now which one we had.
We had the left side.   We had the left side of the poem.

Hebrew runs right to left.
So we had the rhyme scheme of the poem.
And on the top of the poem there was a caption in Arabic, in Judeo-Arabic
which is Arabic written in Hebrew letters.
And the last word of the caption was Dunash.
Dunash was the first really important poet
of this Hebrew renaissance in Spain.
And there was enough of the poem on the left side
so a scholar reading it said,
concluded that this was a poem about a wedding.
And it was important because Dunash was the first --
he was the real pioneer of this period.
And he actually published half of this poem in The Selected Poems
of Dunash that he published around the 1940s.
Lo and behold 30, 40 years later a scholar working in Jerusalem looking
at microfilm of this Cairo Geniza was going through papers,
doing his usual work, and he saw something that rang a bell.
And he suddenly recognized that he had the right side of the poem
that had been torn vertically.   It's a long story.

I'm sort of giving you the short version.
He put them together and they fit perfectly.
It had been ripped in half somehow.
And when he put them together he was shocked.
Several things shocked him.
First of all, it turned out not to be a poem about a wedding but a poem
about a couple separating.   That's not such a big shock.

But it turned out not to be a poem by Dunash, the first poet.
It turned out to be a poem by the wife of Dunash.
So it was, you know, a poem by a woman.
Well, that turned out to be the first poem ever discovered
in medieval Hebrew literary history by a woman.
It also turns out to be the only poem ever discovered
in medieval literary history by a woman.
And it also turns out to be much better
than anything her husband ever wrote.
And it's a very powerful little poem, very personal,
completely embodies the Arabic poetics of the day.
And so I'm going to read that for you now.
Let me just find that.   Where did I put that?

[ Pause ]
So the circumstance of the poem as we see it
in the full version is apparently Dunash has been kicked out of Spain,
told by the reigning Jewish patron of the day
that he has to leave Spain.
We don't really know what the circumstances are.
But you can hear here in this poem the kind of refinement
that this woman had, the sort of quiet bitterness in her voice
but also a real dignity, a real poise.
And the poem is beautifully constructed.
If you think of Islamic art of the period, the kind of symmetries
and vividness, this poem is a kind of linguistic correlate
to the visual esthetic of Islamic art.
Will her love remember her graceful doe,
her only son in her arms as he parted?
On her left hand she placed a ring from his right,
on his wrist she placed her bracelet.
As a keepsake she took his mantle from him,
and he in turn took hers from her.
Would he settle, now, in the land of Spain,
if its prince gave him half his kingdom?

And another poem from this same period, this is a period that's sort
of popularly called the golden age of Hebrew literature.
The most famous poet of that period is a man named Yehudah Halevi.
Next to Maimonides he probably has the greatest name recognition
of any medieval Jew.
He's not my favorite poet I feel obliged to say
because everybody says, oh, Yehudah Halevi he's so great.
He is a great poet but there are better.
But, he wrote some incredibly powerful poems.
He's known mostly for his poems about wanting to leave Spain,
leaving all that behind and making a pilgrimage to the land of Israel.
What I want to read to you now, however though,
is a riddle poem that he wrote.
Again, this is a mode taken over from the Arab poets.
In the show here there is an emblem riddle.
It's a visual picture which kind of contains a visual riddle,
and then there's a poem in rhyme rather long and you have
to guess what the solution to the riddle is.
But the caption in the exhibit says that nobody has yet figured
out the answer to the riddle in that particular picture.
This one is much simpler.
It's only four lines long, and I want to see if anybody
in the audience can guess what the answer to this one is, okay?
Everybody paying attention?
Okay. Evincing the infinite, the size of a palm,
what it holds is beyond you.   Curious at hand.

One more time.
Evincing the infinite, the size of your palm,
what it holds is beyond you.   Curious at hand.

Any guesses?
Evincing the infinite, the size of your palm,
what it holds is beyond you.   Curious at hand.

[Inaudible Audience Comment] No,
Angela says someone else's hand but that's not it.
[Inaudible Audience Comment] The mind?
Don?   >> Don: A mirror.

>> Peter Cole: A mirror.   You have a hand mirror.

You hold the mirror in your hand, you're looking at it.
Evincing the infinite, that quality of a mirror.
The size of your palm.   What it holds is beyond you.

The image of yourself now beyond you.
Curious, yourself looking at that, at hand.
Okay? He's got lots of those.   They're lots of fun.

He also has ones incantation, magic incantation bowls in the exhibit.
Halevi liked to write riddles on bowls, too,
for a little exhortations to the eater.
As he would sit down and look and see there'd be a little poem written
around the edge of his plate.
Okay. There is also in the show several items related
to the Zohar, the Book of the Zohar.
The Zohar is through the Bible of Jewish mysticism composed it used
to be said by Moses de Leon.   Now it's pretty widely acknowledged

that there were a number of authors of this book.
It's not actually a book.   It's many books put together.

And it's a kind of mystical commentary
on the Bible is a loose way of describing it.
Critic Harold Bloom once told me
that he considered the Zohar a picnic
to which all are invited though they must bring their own lunch.
Which is to say there are endless possibilities
of meaning in this book.
What I'm going to read to you from --
so there are two things in the exhibit.
One is one of the earliest editions, printed editions
of the Zohar printed in Italy.
Then there's one, a kind of a charming book,
I think it's 17th, 18th century.
There's a man who's 70 years old, and he's written
out the Zohar himself in very, very big letters,
as it says in the preface, so he can read it at night
by candlelight, and his eyes are weak.
What I'm going to read to you from is a charm
that appears in the Zohar.   And it is a charm against Lilith.

How many people here have heard the name Lilith,
have any idea who Lilith is?
Okay. So just briefly for everybody Lilith is Adam's first wife,
first headstrong wife let's say.
For all kinds of reasons they quarreled.
One was she wanted to have intercourse
in let's say a more active manner than Adam had in mind.
And she was eventually banished.
And ever since then she roamed the world preying on fallen drops
of semen, people who masturbate,
which is considered the sort of ultimate impurity.
And Harold Bloom calls her the muse of masturbation.
And in particular in the Zohar there's a passage --
Zohar is full of pretty widely erotic things.
It's kind of shocking just how graphic they'll get
in their imaginative sort of conjurings of situations.
Friday night the Sabbath is the time
when pious couples are to have intercourse.
Their sexual act is considered holy.
It has a direct and kabbalistic in Jewish mystical writings,
and thought it has a direct effect on the harmony in the heavens,
on the harmony within God Himself, between the male
and the female aspects of the deity, right?
So what we do below on earth, everything including what we do
on Friday night if we're a pious Jewish couple,
affects God directly almost in the sense of kind
of a hydraulic pressure mechanism.   Things are regulated.

And that flow can be reversed from on high down to below as well.
Pious couples when they are together on Friday night if by chance they
happen to want to have intercourse by lamplight, there's the connection
to the candles, the big letters of the candles of that exhibit,
if they have that's considered a sin.
That's considered a transgression.
And if they do that and if semen is spilled, Lilith pounces
and takes those drops of semen, and she can create demons from them
and deformed children and all sorts of things.
She's considered basically a consort of Satan, of [inaudible].
She's considered the queen of the other side, the dark side.
And in this she is the dark correlate
to the positive female force in Jewish mysticism known
as the Shafina [phonetic] which is a major aspect
of Jewish mysticism introduced especially around the 13th century
when the Zohar was written.
So this charm, this little eight line charm is to be recited
by the husband before the couple engages in intercourse
to keep Lilith at bay if she's in the room.
It goes like this.   Incantation Against Lilith.

Veiled in velvet, is she here?   Leave off, leave off.

You shall not enter, you shall not emerge.
It is neither yours nor your share.   Return, return.

The sea is swelling; its waves are calling.
I hold to the holy portion I am held in the holiness of the King.
So if you run out of things to say next time you're
in that position you can think of that.
[Laughter] Okay.
Also curious one of the other items in the exhibit is titled one
of the most curious events in Jewish history, something like that.


Lost it. How we doing for time?
Okay. And this event that the exhibit refers to is the becoming
of a man named Sabbatai Zevi who was perceived in Judaism
in the 17th century as a messiah.
And he never really wrote anything down.
He had a beautiful voice.
He sang, he was kind of a charismatic singer.
Pretty early on in his life he got the sense --
he was basically bipolar scholars think.
He began to perform strange acts.
In the Synagogue he married, he performed a wedding ceremony
to an [inaudible] and himself.
He once showed up in the Synagogue with a fish wrapped in a diaper.
This was going to usher in the Age of Aquarius, the Piscean Age
or one -- I don't remember actually which one it is now.
But he's going to usher in some astrological age.
And there was a man in Gaza named Nathan, now known as Nathan of Gaza,
who was a kabbalist, was a mystic.
And he had heard about some of the strange acts of Sabbatai Zevi
who had gone -- because he was born in Salonica in the Ottoman Empire.
He went to the land of Israel.
And Nathan had this sense that this man was the messiah.
And Nathan also had a reputation of being a healer.
And so Sabbatai Zevi as far as we know felt himself to be disturbed,
sought out the help of this Jewish healer in Gaza, Nathan,
and went to him for counsel.
Strangely enough Nathan said there's nothing wrong
with you, you're the messiah.
I'm joking and giving you the vaudevillian version of it.
But he basically said you are not disturbed.
In fact you have prophetic powers, and he encouraged him
to accept this role of himself as the messiah.
And eventually, Sabbatai Zevi at first refused,
but eventually did accept himself as the messiah.
And then he began doing even stranger things.
He moved the Sabbath to a Monday.
He changed a lot of the Jewish holidays.
Her permitted women to come to read from the Torah.
He encouraged the performing of the sacrifices, Biblical sacrifices
that had been outlawed since the destruction of the second temple.
He encouraged the eating of the fat of the lamb
which in the Biblical sacrificial right was considered
for the priests only and had a kind of sexual symbolism.
In other words, he did basically --
developed a doctrine of redemption through sin.
Not the observance of the Jewish commandments,
but their violation is what would help bring on the redemption.
It has to do with a complicated theology,
kabbalistic mystical theology that involves a descent into matter
into the lowest reaches of the universe to rescue sparks
of original light that had been scattered
in the catastrophe of creation.
I can't go into all the detail there, but the basic principle was
through a descent into matter, into fleshly things, into the realm
of the forbidden redemption would come.
And as you can imagine the Jewish community,
the normative Jewish community did not approve of this.
And they exerted pressure on the Ottoman authorities
who eventually arrested Sabbatai Zevi but not before a full third
of world Jewry began to follow him.
The legend of his acts and his miracles spread so far
and wide throughout the Jewish world that a full third
of world Jewry believed he was the messiah.
Alright? That's a number that's hard to compute.
A third of world Jewry believed he was the messiah.
That means it was the largest messianic movement
in Judaism since Christianity.   So it was a huge deal.

When he was arrested by the Muslin authorities in Turkey he was
under duress, forced to convert to Islam,
but for Sabbatai Zevi that was not a problem.
Another transgression.
The bigger the transgression the more bang you get for your buck.
He converted very happily.
There are pictures, verbal pictures, portraits drawn of his
with the Torah, with Koran in one hand, Hebrew prayer phylacteries,
straps wrapped around his arm, sipping wine, Muslims singing,
Arab or Turkish singing girls all around him.
He was having a grand old time, a kind of early post modernist piling
on all the identities and enjoying them all.
Anyway, he died in exile basically under a kind of house arrest.
The problem was what about all
that third world Jewry once he converted to Islam.
What was going to become of all that?
Well, most of them, obviously, went back and said, no,
they saw the error of their ways.
Obviously they were wrong to believe in him.
They went back to Judaism.
A few of them maintained a Jewish identity, but secretly believed
that he was the messiah
and developed a whole theology around that.
The book that's in the exhibit is a prayer book from around the time
of Sabbatai Zevi from within that community of book Jews who stayed
who are still Jews, but who believed that this man is the messiah.
But there was a very small group of Jews who followed him into Islam.
They converted completely to Islam in Salonica,
and they became known as the donmus.
Donmus is the Turkish word just means apostate.
And they developed a complete double life.
Outwardly they lived as Muslims.
They had Muslim names, they went to the Mosque on Friday.
They did everything that good Muslims do
that Turkish citizens would do.
But at home they had Hebrew or Jewish names.
They developed their own theology.   They had their own prayer book.

And it bore no relation to normal Jewish prayer books.
They had their own hymn book.
And for about 200 years this went on.
And it was only in the 20th century due to population transfers
and complicated things, when that community of donmus began
to break up, that their literature which had been completely secret
up until then began to be known in the west.
Scholars got hold of some of their prayer books.
And it's only in the last 50 years that some
of that stuff has been published.
Now we have 2,000 hymns by the donmus
and they are weirder than weird.
Includes some of this notion of transgression through sin.
They would also engage in a spring festival of the lambs,
the sacrifice of the lambs, and at that point would be
like a spring bacchanalia.
There would be something known as the extinguishing of the lights
when after eating the ritual fat and the lamb the lights would be doused
and couples would exchange spouses.
So I mean, again, not what we were taught
in Sunday School growing up in New Jersey.
So I want to read to you one hymn from one of those prayer books.
And basically these donmus were Jewish Muslims,
or you could call them Muslim Jews.
And you know people are always wanting Jews
and Arabs and Jews and Muslims to get together these days.
This is not what they had in mind.   [Laughter] It goes like this.

I have to find it.   One second.

[ Pause ]
Okay, I gave this one the title The Valley of Ishmael.

So it's in the second person, you,
the poem is addressed to Sabbatai Zevi.
He's already dead but he's considered the messiah.
Through you will the blessing be brought to Israel through the secret
of the Valley of Ishmael.
For the redeemer has come to restore through the secret
of the Valley of Ishmael.
He said the Lord has heard his serve and to have served.
He knew within him has dwelled through the secret
of the Valley of Ishmael.   The letters hold the redemption.

For the jubilee is his foundation through sin he brought
to sanctification through the secret of the Valley of Ishmael.
Zevi our teacher is the redeemer,
it's he who established the upper splendor in primordial space
in the shell's chamber through the secret of the Valley of Ishmael,
these things are seen as though through a veil
and they are most abstruse as well.
But in them I have found the real through the secret


So, I want to jump just for -- how we doing with time?
I seem to have completely lost my watch.
Five minutes, okay.
So we'll do just a couple of modern poems.
In the exhibit there is an item that's titled the first Hebrew poem
printed in the United States.
So I'm not going to read to you from the first
or early Hebrew poetry printed in the United States.
I'm going to read you from work
by the last Hebrew poet in the United States.
Of course, actually there are others who have continued.
But this is the last poet who was really considered an important poet
who wrote powerful poetry.   Maybe others will come along.

But most people consider him at this point to be the last.
His name is Gabriel Preil, was.
He died. He was born in 1911 is Estonia,
died in 1993 actually while visiting Israel,
but he lived in New York almost his entire life.
And he wrote, he just kept on writing in Hebrew.
There was a group of Hebrew poets in New York especially.
Actually not just New York, all around the United States.
In my opinion and I think in the opinion
of others he was the best of the.
In this book Hebrew Writers on Writing I have a prose piece of his
that he wrote in Yiddish which is all
about how important the weather is for a poet.
There are certain kinds of poets who can't say anything
about how they feel without channeling it
through a description of the weather.
And in a certain sense he saw himself as one of those.
So here's a poem of his that deals to some extent with the weather.
It's entitled Gramercy Park in New York, those of you who know
that lovely little square there.   Gramercy Park and it goes like this.

Walking into that mild square is
like refuting the fact of our chilly existence.
And the darker Jobness of it,
a kind of spring colors the surface of things.
And even the past starts disbursing small smiles so that the women, too,
are beautiful there, and the books open exactly to the place
where the author is telling
of a certain not quite sadness beyond a blue door.

Maybe two more.
One of my favorite, probably my favorite contemporary Israeli poet
is a man named Aharon Shabtai.
As Peggy mentioned I translated quite a few
of his poems, three or four books.
The last one is called Love & War, War & Love.
Shabtai he's a kind of Titanic force in contemporary Hebrew.
He's reviled today because he's so incendiary, and he's almost kind
of professionally provocative.
By design he sees his role, he sees the poet's role
as someone who's there to get under the skin of most readers.
And he's done this throughout his life.
His poems have been published for a long, long time in the pages
of Haaretz which is the major intellectual serious newspaper
in Israel.
It's like the New York Times of Israel.
Unlike the New York Times it publishes a great deal of poetry
and translation every weekend.
So a lot of the poetry that's published
in Israel doesn't just appear in literary magazines like in America.
Some of it appears on the pages of the major newspaper
so everybody reads these things all the time.
And there was a period particularly during the second Intifada
when Shabtai was writing just ferocious political poems,
absolutely ferocious.
Some of the best political poetry I've ever read in any language.
And he was taking a tremendous amount of flak for it also.
And so was the publisher of Haaretz,
because every time he would publish one of these poems angry letters
to the editor would follow even though it's a liberal newspaper.
And the publisher defended this poet all the time saying he's 20 years
ahead of his readership.   One day they'll understand.

So I'll read this one which is very much about to the state of things
in Israel around the year written in 1998.
Things have not gotten any better.
They've only gotten worse in my opinion.
But it's also very much a poem about the Hebrew language
which is another one of the themes
of the exhibit is the power of Hebrew.
Right? And so he is writing about what the political situation
in Israel as he sees it has done to corrupt the language that he loves.
Okay, I'll read this and then read one other
that goes back a little bit to the beginning o the century.
This is called The Reason to Live Here.
And I should tell you that the circumstances of this poem were
such -- Haaretz, this newspaper --
there's a joke in Israel that the last person
out of the country should turn the lights out at the airport, right?
In other words, things are always getting so bad it's assumed
that sooner or later everybody -- everybody wants to leave.
Sooner or later everybody will go,
please turn the lights off when you leave.
So they polled a bunch of writers in [inaudible] and they often do this.
They have these kind of surveys, they ask a bunch
of writers what's your favorite book that you read in the last year,
whatever, sort of the normal questions.
And this one they asked him what's your reason
for staying in the country?
Because a lot of people in Israel have other passports.
They could go, they could get jobs somewhere else.
And the brain drain is very serious there.
So he didn't answer that question directly.
He answered it by writing a poem called The Reason to Live Here.

This country is turning into the private estate of twenty families.
Look at its fattened political arm at the thick neck
of its bloated bureaucracy.   These are the officers of Samaria.

There's no need to consult the oracle,
but the capital swine leaves behind the nationalist hyena shreds
with its teeth.
When the governor of the Bank of Israel raises the interest rate
by half a percent the rich are provided
with backyard pools by the poor.
The soldier at the outpost guards the [inaudible] who will put a lien
on his home when he's laid off from the privatized factory
and falls behind on his mortgage payments.
The pure words I suckled from my mother's breasts, man, child,
justice, mercy and so
on are dispossessed before our eyes imprisoned
in ghettos, murdered at checkpoints.
And yet there's still good reason to stay on and live here.
To hide the surviving words in the kitchen,
in the basement or the bathroom.
The prophet Melampus saved twin or thin snakes
from the hand of his slaves.
They slithered toward his bed while he slept then licked the oracles
of his ears.
When he woke with a fright he found he could follow the speech of birds.
So Hebrew delivered will lick the walls of our hearts.
And the last poem I want to read is in a very, very different vain.
It's by a man named Avraham Ben Yitzhak.
And he is considered a legend in the history of Hebrew poetry.
I translated his collected poems, all twelve of them.
And he was born in 1883 is it, yeah, 1883, died in 1950.
He published only twelve poems in his entire lifetime,
most of them in his 20s and then one in his 30s I believe it was,
one in his 40s and he fell silent.
But these poems were just considered sort of models
for almost every Hebrew poet.
And the last poem that he published is a poem in a certain sense
about a lot of things, but it's also about not writing, not speaking.
What it is that words
can and can't do, or what it is that he has to say and doesn't want
to say or can't find the words for.
So it's an incredibly powerful poem especially
when read alongside the fact that this man fell silent
for the rest of his life after this.
And you'll hear echoes of the New Testament here
and all sorts of things.
It's called Blessed are Those Who Sow and Do Not Reap.
Blessed are those who sow and do not reap.
They shall wander in extremity.   Blessed are the generous whose glory

in youth has enhanced the extravagant brightness of days
who shed their accouterments at the crossroads.
Blessed are the proud whose pride overflows the banks of their souls
to become the modesty of whiteness in the wake
of a rainbow's ascent through the clouds.
Blessed are they who know their hearts will cry
out from the wilderness, and the quiet will blossom from their lips.
Blessed are these for they will be gathered to the heart
of the world wrapped in the mantle of oblivion,
their destinies offered unuttered to the end.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]

There's my watch.   [Laughter]

>> What time is it?   >> Peter Cole: One o'clock.

>> Okay, perfect timing.
Thank you so much for giving us more than 100 years of poetry,
really 1,000 years of poetry.
So we got ten times what we thought we were going to get today.


>> Peter Cole: Yeah?   [ Inaudible Audience Question ]

Yeah, the question or the comment is that I read a poem,
a riddle poem about the mirror that we talked about.
And the gentleman said that that kind of image is typical
of colloquial Arabic, right, or the Arabics
or the [inaudible audience comment] right, folks riddles, yes.
And it's something that's very, very deep.
It runs deep in Arabic culture.
In fact, when you learn Arabic as I've learned Arabic that's the kind
of thing you learn also because they're easy
to learn because they rhyme, too.   And they're lots of fun.

And they're also quite magical in a lot of ways.
And it is testament to what I had said before of this as opposed
to the Shabbataian grafting of Muslim and Jewish things.
Andalusian, Spanish, Iberian grafting of Hebrew and Islamic
or Arab style Arabic culture was deep.
It ran very, very deep.
I mean the Jews of that period spoke Arabic
as their mother tongue, right?   That was their language.

They did everything in Arabic.
They dreamt in Arabic, they shopped in Arabic,
all their philosophy they wrote, everything except
for poetry and prayers in Arabic.
There's even the first Hebrew dictionary written
in Babylonian Baghdad in the 10th century.
It's a rhyming dictionary for poets.
And the writer writes in a preface, and he has the preface
in Arabic and a preface in Hebrew.
He tells the Hebrew poets you should do everything in Hebrew,
use it even in the bedroom.
In other words, obviously they didn't use it
in the bedroom, they're using Arabic.
But it should also be said
that Hebrew while it wasn't their mother tongue wasn't some completely
artificial thing because they learned it from the age of three.
So these people also had Hebrew in them in a very, very deep way,
particularly the Bible, all the Rabbinic literature.
So Hebrew was very natural for them,
but Arabic in a certain sense ran even deeper.
Yeah?   [ Inaudible Audience Comment ]

The question is I read the poems in translation, could I comment
on what is lost in translation?
Of course, I think that nothing is lost.
In fact it's much better.
Jorge Luis Borges has a comment in his Eliot Norton lectures years ago,
I think the 60s, he gave them at Harvard.
And he said, you know after, and I'm not talking about myself here,
I'm talking about what he said, after one reads a good translation
or spends a lot of time thinking about translation in a serious way,
and then you return to the original the original is always a
little disappointing.
[Laughter] So I just answer that by way
of continuing this theme of obliquity here.
But discussions of the translation always begin in the possibility
and the questions of loss.   I don't think about loss.

I think about pleasure.
What are the pleasures of translation.
What is gained in translation.
Let's say some of you had a half way decent time today,
liked at least some of the poems.   Alright, you got something.

Something that you wouldn't get probably
because you don't read Hebrew.   I mean some of you might.

But even some of you who read Hebrew might have seen some
of these poems in a new light.
And so for me I don't say that somebody --
translation requires a mixture of humility and presumption.
We always like to talk about the humility.
I'm reminded of the need to be --   I'm humiliated by the need

for humility all the time as a translator.
The other side gets much less attention,
but I think it's actually a much more active
and valuable force in the world.
So for me that's sort of where I come down.
[ Pause ]
Don't be intimated by the fact that you're being filmed and recorded
by the Library of Congress.   [Laughter] I wasn't.

Just a little.
Anything else?   No, okay.


>> Thank you so much, and thank you
for helping us understand the exhibit across the hall,
Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress,
1912 2012 in terms of all the poetry that's in the exhibit.
So thank you very much.   [ Applause ]

[ Pause ]
>> Peggy Pearlstein: Hello, I'm Peggy Pearlstein,
Head of the Hebraic section at the Library of Congress.
I'm standing in front of our exhibit, Words Like Sapphires:
100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress, 1912 2012.
At the end of our exhibit we have a whole section on Hebrew poetry.
And with us today on Monday, November 5, 2012, is poet
and translator Peter Cole.
He will be reading his English translation
from the Hebrew poem Will Her Love Remember attributed
to the wife of Dunash ben Labrat.
Among the thousands of medieval Hebrew poems, this is the only one
that seems to have been written by a woman.
And now Mr. Cole, Will Her Love Remember.
>> Peter Cole: So this is the only poem we have in the history
of the Hebrew middle ages by a woman.
And it's from the middle of the 10th century


Will her love remember his graceful doe,
her only son in her arms as he parted?
On her left hand he placed a ring from his right,
on his wrist she placed her bracelet.
As a keepsake she took his mantle from him,
and he in turn took hers from her.
Would he settle, now, in the land of Spain,
if its prince gave him half his kingdom?

>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.