Gabirol at
the Beach
In
Málaga, in a little park across from and down the hill from the Alcazar, stands—or
stood, at least in the year 2000—a statue of a famous Spanish Jew from the
eleventh century that seems the last remaining sign or outpost of a Jewish
presence in this coastal city that for many tourists is the portal to southern
Spain.
The statue commemorates, according to the inscription
on the pedestal, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, “poet and philosopher.” Jews worldwide
who attend synagogue services even occasionally, probably are familiar with the
liturgical poem “Adon Olam,” generally attributed to Ibn Gabirol. Sephardic
Jews may be familiar with his long poem “Keter Malchut.” A handful of literary
scholars and some poetry aficionados may be familiar with the larger corpus of
his poetry. Philosophers and theologians in and out of the Jewish world may be
familiar with his Fons Vitae. All in
all, however, Solomon Ibn Gabirol is not a household name, and his work is not
so easy to find.
He was
born in Málaga in about 1021, moved to
(Left) Festival (Féria, in August) in
Christians over Muslims. (Middle) Relief
map of
(Right) Castle in
Like
the man and his work, the statue was not easy to find, but once found, seemed in
an obvious place—in what was probably the Jewish quarter in medieval Málaga; in
a park, where statues of fallen heroes often are found; and near the beach, the
transition between land and sea, a metaphorical transition, between the
physical world of the poet and the spiritual world of the philosopher, worlds
that Ibn Gabirol inhabited and wrote about. Yes—Ibn Gabirol, when he lived
here, surely must have walked this beach on the same
Why is
the work of this great poet “not easy to find”? Until the nineteenth century
readers and scholars knew he was a poet but didn’t know the poet was the same
as a man known by the Latin name Avicebrol or Avicebron, author of the
well-known philosophical work known in Latin as the Fons Vitae, the “Fountain of Life,” a work offering no hint of its
author’s Jewishness or knowledge of Judaism.
Like
many of the other of the “big five” medieval Spanish-Jewish poets, Ibn Gabirol
wrote poems that express, either separately or together, an unusual and complex
mixture of humility, lyricism, religiosity, metaphysics, self-confidence, anger
and cynicism, ego, and bitterness.
There
is the extreme, almost swaggering self-confidence to be expected of a talented
young poet, who is “only/sixteen years old but” whose “heart holds wisdom
like/some poet 8o year old man” (“The 16-Year-Old Poet”) (all references are to
poems found on the Ibn Gabirol page on this web site).
Later
it evolves into an attitude that many writers possess but hold in check for
fear of appearing childish. Not Ibn Gabirol, who asks:
Where are the men with the strength to be men?
Where are those who have eyes and can see?
And every one of these poor beggars
Thinks of himself as another Aristotle.
You tell me they have written poems—
You call that poetry?
I call it the cawing of crows… (“His Answer to the Critics”).
Along
with such a blast of mockery comes, in “Earth’s Embroidery,” such deep regard
for the beauty of nature, that “No artist could ever conceive the like of
that.”
Ibn
Gabirol is, as well, deeply attuned to the times of day and the sensibilities
accompanying them. Like the Indian musician playing morning ragas in the
morning and evening ragas in the evening, and of course like the religious Jew
praying during these times in response to the requirements of the liturgy, Ibn
Gabirol responds to these transitional times in his poetry as when he says,
“Morning and evening I seek you” (“In Praise of God”).
He is
especially fond of dawn, saying, for example, “I look for you early” (“I Look
for You”), “Open the gate my beloved—/arise, and open the gate” (“Open the
Gate”), “Come up to me at early dawn” (“Invitation”), and “Arise, O my rapture,
at dawn I exclaim” (“Arise, O My Rapture”).
But of
course there is no day without night, and so he writes (“Night-Thoughts”):
“Will night already spread her wings and weave/her dusky robe about the day’s
bright form…?”
Could
this interplay of light and dark have manifested in the dappling on the statue
in the park? Could it symbolize the hide-and-seek readers have experienced with
his work?
Ibn
Gabirol wrote secular poetry, religious poetry, and liturgical poetry but
probably is best known for his liturgical poetry. Can these poems be easily
distinguished? Yes and no. Poems with God in them can be separated from those
without, and editors and commentators have simplified the task by separating
the poems into categories. However, when organizing the selections on this web
site, I decided, with Ibn Gabirol, to mix things up to some extent, since,
whatever the author’s original intentions for his work, like many of us, some
poets tend to disdain categories for their work. And so sometimes an obviously
religious poem can beautifully follow an obviously secular poem, and vice
versa. Then again, perhaps none of these poems is “obviously” anything we think
it is or can imagine.
In 2000
the park was being renovated, but oddly his image seems more renovated in Spain
than in the rest of the Jewish world—oddly because Spain seems to be reclaiming
its Jewish heritage while matters of poetry and poets are, except for pockets
of exception in the world of Jewish scholarship, pretty much ignored in the
Jewish world at large, just as they are in the general world at large.
Still,
in 2001, the year after the statue was visited and photographed, the poet Peter
Cole published a collection of English translations of Ibn Gabirol that is the
first such collection published since 1923. And in recent years there also has
been a spate of translations of Ibn Gabirol’s challenging
philosophical-metaphysical long poem “Keter Malchut,” familiar to Sephardic
Jews in whose High Holiday liturgy it may be included. This poem, which Mr Cole
has translated, appears in the 1923 bilingual edition of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry
and in recent translations by Rafael Loewe, David Slavitt, and Bernard Lewis.
It is
odd that such a poem swings both ways, secular (philosophical-metaphysical) and
religious, an example of the fluid poetic boundaries of the day or of our day,
or maybe instead an example of migration from one sphere to another. Could this
migration parallel that of Ibn Gabirol the poet from the small, hermetic Jewish
world of religion and letters into the bustling modern Andalucian-Catholic
world epitomized by a small park under renovation in a modern city that is a
gateway to all things Spanish. Olé!
The
statue of Ibn Gabirol photographed poorly and ended up dappled with shadows and
framed by orange under-construction gates warning, if not in words, to keep
out. Could these words also apply to “Keter Malchut,” translated twice as “The
Royal Crown” and once as “The Kingly Crown,” “The Crown of the King,” and
“Kingdom’s Crown,” for if expert translators cannot agree on a title for this
lengthy, complex poem, how is the inexpert reader to pass beyond the gate of
the title into the park of the poem itself?
And
what about the Fons Vitae? How could
a Jewish poet write such a seemingly un-Jewish philosophical treatise? Well,
nothing wrong with being both a poet and a philosopher, is there? Think of
Martin Buber, who collected and wrote Hasidic stories of rabbis in flying
coaches and who also wrote sometimes impenetrable philosophic essays that
explore universals that seem to transcend the boundaries of Judaism. The Crown
of the King. The Fountain of Life. The expansive reader can, I suspect, move
back and forth between the universal and particular in almost any line of Ibn
Gabirol’s poems or in Buber’s works; the unsuspecting reader is,
unintentionally, as expansive. Ross Brann explores other puzzles and shades of
ambiguity in the work and lives of the medieval Hebrew poets in his subtle and
sophisticated book The Compunctious Poet:
Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim
In
“Keter Malchut,” a melding of poetry and neoplatonic philosophy, Ibn Gabirol
straddles the worlds, as he did in his life. In this poem he is not a poetic
philosopher or a philosophical poet; rather, he meshes the two roles.
Contemporary philosophers believe today that to fully understand his philosophy,
his poetry must also be studied for its presentation of philosophy. And yet
surely this distracts from appreciating the poetry on its own terms, for let us
not forget, in the face of readings of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry that seek out the
philosophy, Robert Penn Warren’s famous question, “How does a poem mean?” Can a
poem shorn of its metaphors, its rhythm, sound, its music, and most importantly
its emotion, really mean much of anything?
The
poetic imagery shifts between light and dark, dusk and dawn, standard
dichotomies, it could be argued, bulwarks of Jewish liturgy, imagery found as
well in the language of mysticism, some of it expressed in poetry and some in
prose, in, for example, the Zohar, the writings of St. John of the Cross, of
Rumi, Meister Eckhart—the list could be very long. Sure, the reader can view
the basic concepts as conventional, but the way the concepts are expressed is
unique to each writer, including Ibn Gabirol, and derive from personal
experience.
He is
at the beach, on the edge of the sea, the junction of light and dark, dry land
and infinitely wet ocean, transitional zone between the safe familiarity of the
city with the unknown depths of the sea. Then again, all of this may have had
absolutely no effect on the poet-philosopher, since scholarship has shown that
people’s attitudes toward beaches have changed radically over the years. In
addition, modern scholars do not like to project modern-day sensibilities back
into the past. Nevertheless, the modern reader with a poetic sensibility would
like to think picture Ibn Gabirol at the beach and see in this picture some
influence on his life and work.
As a
twentieth-century poet once said, “Poets are the antennae of their race.”
Perhaps Ibn Gabirol’s statue is a kind of antenna, reaching to the heavens,
beseeching God, while at the same time conducting the energy of the imagination
from above to below, the ground of Málaga, Spain, part of it beach, almost a
thousand years after his birth.
—Henry Rasof
Copyright
© 2006 Henry Rasof and medievalhebrewpoetry.org.