TLS November 23 2007

from Gabriel Josipovici's review of The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492 edited and translated by Peter Cole:


The title of Cole's anthology is taken from a remark by the leading Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: "Andalus . . . might be here or there, or anywhere . . . A meeting place of strangers in the project of building human culture . . . . It is ot only that there was a Jewish-Mulsim co-existence, but that the fates of the two people were similar . . . . Al-Andalus for me is the realization of the dream of the poem".


Poem by early-fourteenth century Todros Abulafia:

The day you left was bitter and dark,
you finest thing, you - and when I think of it,
it feels like there's nothing left of my skin.
Your feet, by far, were more beautiful,
the day they mounted
and wrapped my neck in a ring.

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