I was thrilled to learn this week that the poet, translator, and publisher Peter Cole was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known as "the genius grant"). Cole and his wife Adina Hoffman are the founders and, with Gabriel Levin, editors of Ibis Editions, a small press based in Israel that is committed to promoting cross-cultural understanding in the Levant (They deliberately avoid the term "Middle East."). On their "about" page they describe their objectives as follows:
The press publishes translations from Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, and the other languages of the region. New writing is published, though special attention is paid to overlooked works from the recent and distant past. Ibis aims to make a modest contribution to the literature of this part of the world by drawing together a group of writers and translators whom both politics and market-forces would otherwise keep far apart, or out of print altogether. Ibis is motivated by the belief that literary work, especially when translated into a common language, can serve as an important vehicle for the promotion of understanding between individuals and peoples, and for the discovery of common ground.
Small literary presses are more often than not labors of love and Ibis Editions is no exception. But the MacArthur Fellowship also recognizes Cole's astounding translations of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature (Taha Muhammad Ali, Yoel Hoffman, Aharon Shabtai, Harold Schimmel and others) and Medieval Hebrew poetry. This year, Princeton University Press published the anthology The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, 576 pages of poems translated by Cole. He is also the author of the poetry collections Rift (1989), Hymns & Qualms (1998), and What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998 (2005).
To learn more about Ibis and Cole's thoughts on translation and poetry, I highly recommend reading the transcript of Leonard Schwartz's radio interview with Cole. To go directly to a PDF sampler of poems from his most recent collection, click these words. I also encourage you to browse the Ibis catalogue and support its editors, writers and translators with a purchase.
A night the letters fell from the wall
like startled minnows, shimmering...
--from "Torches" by Peter Cole (in Rift)
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