Peter Cole
Poet & Translator of Hebrew and Arabic
“Peter Cole is a true maker. His extraordinary learning is deep and personal, and his poems, like his translations, are powered by a large spiritual quest to link and light the world with words. He stands with amazement before great mysteries.” —Edward Hirsch
The recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Peter Cole has published three books of poetry, Rift (Station Hill); Hymns & Qualms (Sheep Meadow Press); and, most recently, Things on Which I've Stumbled (New Directions). A fourth volume, What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1989, was published by Shearsman Books in the UK. “Prosodic mastery fuses with a keen moral intelligence” in Cole’s work, wrote the American Poet. Other reviewers have noted the “politically charged and often dazzling” nature of the verse, as well as the “quiet, streaming power in [his] work that leads the reader back to it over and over again.” Cole’s vision of connectedness, his wit, and his grounded wisdom, along with his expansive sense of literature’s place in a meaningful life, render his poems at once fresh and abiding.
Cole has also worked intensively on Hebrew literature, with special emphasis on medieval Hebrew poetry. His prize-winning translations of the Hebrew Golden Age poets have helped to recreate for contemporary American readers the multifaceted world of medieval Spain, in which Jewish artistic and intellectual communities flourished under Islamic rule. His 2007 anthology, The Dream of the Poem—recipient of the National Jewish Book Award and winner of the American Publishers Association’s award for Book of the Year— traces the arc of the entire period and reveals this remarkable poetic world in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. 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.” Among Cole’s translations from contemporary Hebrew and Arabic poetry and fiction are also Love & Selected Poems of Aharon Shabtai (Sheep Meadow); J’Accuse, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions); So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005 by Taha Muhammad Ali (Copper Canyon); The Collected Poems of Avraham Ben Yitzhak (Ibis); and Curriculum Vitae, by Yoel Hoffmann (New Directions).
Cole has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 1998 Modern Language Association Translation Award. J’Accuse received the 2004 PEN-America Award for Poetry in Translation. He has taught and been a visiting artist at Yale, Wesleyan, and Middlebury. One of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of the literature of the Levant, Cole was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957. He began studying Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1981 and has since divided his time between Israel and the United States.
About THINGS ON WHICH I'VE STUMBLED (2008)
“Peter Cole is best known as a matchless translator of Hebrew poetry. With Things on Which I’ve Stumbled he matures into one of the handful of authentic poets in his own generation.” —Harold Bloom
Cole must be one of very few writers to achieve enduring fame as a translator. He lives in Jerusalem and writes his own poems in English, and this first book of his verse in 10 years looks at the long, international history of Jewish literature, the modern enterprise of translation, the troubled contexts of his Middle East, as well as marital love and the making of miracles such as forgiveness,/ friendship souring inside aloneness,// delight which leaves one exalted. His self-scrutiny is identified with Jewish tradition: Where are you, calls the Lord, from beyond/ language. He is outraged at what the state of Israel has become, a state whose army says to Palestinians, in the words of one poem, You'll now need a permit just to stay home. Cole's grave intellection gives this book its best moments and—when his abstractions fail to catch fire—its weakest. Though it utilizes a number of poetic forms, the collection truly shines when Cole chooses the short-lined, sometimes fragmentlike free verse that links him to another poet of terse moral seriousness, George Oppen; admirers of Oppen—and anyone with any interest in Cole's topics—will cherish much of this admirable book. —Publisher's Weekly
About THE DREAM OF THE POEM (2007)
“A brilliant and original body of Hebrew verse.... In Peter Cole's rich new anthology [The Dream of the Poem], the extent of [this] astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English.... His versions are masterly.” —Eric Ormsby, The New York Times Book Review
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."
Peter Cole website
