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). Forthcoming in 2011 from Schocken is the nonfiction book Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which he co-authored with his wife Adina Hoffman.
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. Cole has most recently won an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 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
In Peter Cole’s remarkable new book, the forces and sources that have long driven his work come together in singular fashion. Things on Which I’ve Stumbled rides a variable music that takes it from an archeology of mysterious poetic fragments unearthed in an ancient Egyptian synagogue to poignant political commentary on the blighted hills surrounding modern Jerusalem. “[A] major book,” ForeWord Magazine called it. “The title-poem is a tour de-force…. Readers searching for wholly modern poetry dealing with spiritual issues, grounded in history, and presented with great craft will find it in Cole’s new book.”
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 reveals this remarkable poetic world to English readers with translations of “unsurpassed scope, quality and importance,” as one reviewer noted. 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 book is, said Gabriel Josipovici in The TLS, “a treasure trove, a labour of love and exceptional erudition, which will open up to the reader a world of poetry and culture as rich as anything in human civilization…. The range is astonishing … and [Cole] has produced a book which is by turns moving, charming, and funny.”
Peter Cole website
