[New-Poetry] DREAM OF THE POEM

[Anny Ballardini]

How much does Marjorie Perloff write and how well does she write!
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  Subject: [New-Poetry] DREAM OF THE POEM


  http://www.bookforum.com/perloff.html  
  THE DREAM OF THE POEM: HEBREW POETRY FROM MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN SPAIN, 950—1492 TRANSLATED AND EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PETER COLE. PRINCETON, NJ: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. 576 PAGES. $50. BUY NOW
     
  by Marjorie Perloff
    In the middle of the tenth century, a young Moroccan Jewish poet named Dunash ben Labrat arrived in the Andalusian city of Cordoba, then ruled by the blue-eyed caliph of Spanish-Basque descent 'Abd al-Rahmaan III. Dunash had studied in Baghdad, then considered the most spectacular city in the world, with the head of the Babylonian Jewish academy of Sura, Sa'adia ben Yosef al-Fayuumi, a man of great learning, who taught him, among other things, a keen appreciation of Arabic and its notion of fasaaha (radiance, clarity), as well as its importance for the understanding of Hebrew Scripture. Tenth-century Cordoba was a second Baghdad: a sophisticated city, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in relative harmony and Arabic was the dominant language. "By the mid–tenth century," writes Peter Cole, "Jews, Christians, North-African Berber Muslims, and Christian converts were competing with the Arabs themselves for mastery of that most beautiful of languages, which became both the lingua franca of al-Andalus and the currency of high culture." Indeed, conditions for the Jews were so favorable that the conversion rate was low: They spoke Arabic, adopted native dress, and worked side by side with their Muslim neighbors. Dunash, settling in Cordoba and adapting the inflections of Arabic poetry to his native Hebrew, declared, "Let Scripture be your Eden . . . and the Arabs' books your paradise grove." 
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