One of
the greatest of the medieval poets of Spain was Solomon b. Judah Ibn
Gabirol of Cordova (c1021-1058). Little is known of his life after he
left Saragossa at the age of sixteen, except that he seemed to have
suffered from melancholia and loneliness and to have died young. Ibn
Gabirol was a philosopher and a poet, "a poet whose poems are consecrated
by the intellect, a thinker whose thoughts are transfigured by poetry."
[1]
His chief
philosophical work, written in Arabic, was called Meqor Hayyim
dealt with the nature of the divine essence and will; his ethical work
Tikkun Middor ha-Nefesh, the first work of its kind by a Jewish
philosopher, in asmuch as it presented an ethical system independent
of any specific religious tradition.
Ibn Gabirol
was filled with enthusiasm for the Hebrew language; from earliest childhood
he made it his goal to restore its original charm and freshness; and
he strove to make it possible for the song of the pious singers of old
to be heard in it again. Faithful to his goal, he was active in all
the fields of religious lyric and did more than anyone else for the
dissemination of Hebrew poetry. We have from his hand hymns and meditations,
selihot (penitential prayers) and prayers, qinot (dirges)
and hopeful, longing visions of the future in the most varied forms
and styles.[2]
Ibn
Gabirol's secular poetry deals with the standard themes of wine, friends,
loneliness and sorrow; it expresses both a joie de vivre and
despair at the vanity of life and worldly striving.
In the following
brief, but exquisite poem about the magnificent colors found in nature, the
poet paints a canvas of flowers and stars; the rains of autumn serve as a metaphor
for the creative act of writing. It is said that every imaginable color has
its origin in the natural world.
With the ink of its showers and rains, with the quill
of its illuminating lightning, and the hand of its clouds,
autumn wrote a letter upon the garden, in purple and blue.
No artist could conceive of such things.
And this is why the earth, grown jealous of the sky,
embroidered stars in the folds of the flowerbeds.
[1]
Michael Jehiel Sachs, Der Religiuse Poesie der Juden in Spanien.
Berlin: Veit und Co., 1845, p. 223. [Back]
[2]
Ibn Gabirol's sacred poems were collected in the (second) edition by
H.N. Bialik and I.H.Ravnitzky (Tel Aviv, Dvir, 1927/8, 1931/32).
See Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, ed. I. Davidson,
trans. I. Zangwill I(Philadelphia: JPS, 1928). [Back]
