NEWSWEEK: How has poetry helped you cope with the mistrust and violence between Israel and its Arab-speaking neighbors? Peter Cole: It’s hard to boil these things down. All of the medieval work has been central to my sense of how these cultures can come together and has certainly recalibrated me as a person. I love Arabic and have had marvelous teachers and formed meaningful friendships within it. And of course it took me to Taha Muhammad Ali [a contemporary Palestinian poet], whose work is absolutely vital in the context of the conflict, as is the very different, and far more polarizing, work of the Hebrew poet Aharon Shabtai. I can think of several poems of my own that have helped. The first thing that comes to mind is “I Sing a Doubled Song,” a poem about the Hebron massacre, when a Brooklyn-born Jewish physician burst into a mosque in Hebron during Ramadan, and on Purim, and opened fire.
It’s sometimes said that Jews were chosen to suffer. One might also say that poets are chosen to suffer; certainly Hebrew poetry reflects much pain. I think the notion of Jews “being chosen” for anything of this sort is dangerous. What interests me most is the role that Jews have often played as intermediaries—between cultures and languages. I find that endlessly fascinating and rich … [But] in the global village, the old antagonism, or polarity, of diaspora and homeland makes less and less sense—and does more and more damage. Something has to change.
You’ve said that the Spanish Sephardic tradition is richer than the Eastern European-Yiddish one that influences much Jewish poetry. Which modern Hebrew poets seem to most live out of the Sephardic tradition? What I mean is that it’s richer for me and interests me more than does the watered-down Yiddish influence that lies behind a lot of Jewish poetry written in English. But this doesn’t need to be the case. Very few poets emerge in a serious way from that Sephardic tradition. One who does, and who is producing interesting work, is Haviva Pedaya.
Can you see a future where Hebrew and Arabic poetry enrich each other, with Jerusalem as a center? For the most part, all things Arabic are treated in Israel with condescension, at best, and often with contempt. Many Arab writers know Hebrew quite well and have absorbed a great deal of world literature through Hebrew. The same, alas, can’t be said for Hebrew writers.
You are not institutionally religious, yet much of the work you translate is devotional. Do you ever use poetry for guidance or solace? Is it a kind of prayer? Poetry is a part of me, in all situations, so it’s hard to think of it as something that I’d use—as though it could be picked up and then put back down. If anything, I suppose it uses me. As for its relation to “prayer”—[the French philosopher] Malebranche said that “attention is the natural prayer of the soul”—and the translation of poetry is all about attention.
Would you describe your new book of your own poetry as both personal and political? “Things on Which I’ve Stumbled” is due out in the spring of ‘09. It is both personal and political, in the sense that the politics that matter most is about people, those who make up the polis, the name the ancient Greeks gave to the city-state. In a few instances, “politics” in the conventional sense also becomes the subject.
How did you feel when you first heard you won a MacArthur “genius” grant? Shock and yaw. The room bent a little bit. Immediately afterwards—tremendously grateful, in particular to everyone who had helped me along the way. I felt as though the fellowship was being granted for having, with them, upheld an ideal. As for the “genius” label—the award, as the foundation defines it, is for creativity and for an ability to make connections, or to work with the connections that had perhaps been made but not acted on. That describes my work in both poetry and translation, and of course what we do at Ibis. I know a few geniuses, and I’m not one of them.
