The poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical verse from the Jewish tradition
Author(s): Peter Cole
This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry from the world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem's call to plumb the "tremendous poetic potential concealed" in the Kabbalistic tradition, MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole provides dazzling English renderings of works composed on three continents over a period of some fifteen hundred years. The volume presents the texts in their original languages alongside the English translations. These prayerful poems represent different cultural terrains and take up multiple tacks. The reader will encounter cosmological masterpieces and occasional poems; erotic charms and epic phantasmagoria; ballad-like lyrics and didactic mottoes; simple hymns of pure devotion and gnomic verse of numerical intrigue. Cole supplies an insightful introduction along with commentaries on the poems, and in an elegant afterword Aminadav Dykman places Kabbalistic verse in the context of world literature.
General Information
- :
- : Yale University Press
- : Yale University Press
- : 01 June 2014
- : United States
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Peter Cole
- : Paperback
- : 808.81
- : 544
More About The Product
Peter Cole is the author of three books of poems and the translator of more than a dozen volumes from Hebrew and Arabic. His many honours include the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry and the PEN Translation Award for Poetry. In 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2010 he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He divides his time between New Haven and Jerusalem. Aminadav Dykman teaches comparative literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has published numerous translations of French, Russian, English, Greek, Latin, and Italian poems into Hebrew.
