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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]
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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 nature, the poet paints
a canvas of flowers and stars, the rains of autumn serving as a metaphor
for the creative act of writing. It is said that every imaginable color
has its origin in the natural world. This poem, which appeared in the
RAIN edition of JHOM several months
ago, is
reprinted
in this edition for its celebration of the magnificent colors found
in nature.
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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.
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[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]
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