Peter Cole will speak on “Wanting Song, In the Beginning: Poetic Surprise and Jewish Life”
Poet, translator, MacArthur Foundation fellow and senior lecturer at Yale, Peter Cole has published several volumes of poetry and translation, including The Dream of the Poem (2007), his prize-winning anthology of translations of medieval Hebrew poetry. In his lecture he will attempt some broader reflection on the religious functions of Jewish poetry in its various socio-historical contexts.
The 35th Annual Hannah A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies
A Mini-Residency
Middlebury College
October 17-18, 2023
Lecture, Tuesday, October 17
4:30 pm, Twilight Hall Auditorium
Peter Cole will speak on “Wanting Song, In the Beginning: Poetic Surprise and Jewish Life”
Poet, translator, MacArthur Foundation fellow and senior lecturer at Yale, Peter Cole has published several volumes of poetry and translation, including The Dream of the Poem (2007), his prize-winning anthology of translations of medieval Hebrew poetry. In his lecture he will attempt some broader reflection on the religious functions of Jewish poetry in its various socio-historical contexts.
Poetry Reading, Wednesday, October 18
4:30 pm, Abernethy Room
Cole reads from his new book of poems, Draw Me After (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022)
The Hannah A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies, now in its 35th year, was established with the mandate “to provoke interest in and to deepen understanding of the culture, the religion, the history, and the literature of the Jews, and to bring a Jewish perspective to bear on ethical and political questions. Its goal is also to draw not only the Middlebury College community, but the people of the town and region into the discussion and debate.” In that spirit, all are welcome.
For further information, click here.
Contact: Vijaya Wunnava, Coordinator, Program in Jewish Studies, Middlebury College, Middlebury VT 05753
Email: vwunnava@midlebury.edu / Tel. 802-443-5009.
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Peter Cole is a celebrated poet and translator whose work takes root where cultures meet and where tradition is at once retrieved and extended in vital fashion. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (The American Poet), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a ramifying vision of connectedness that defies conventional distinctions between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original. He is, Harold Bloom wrote, “a matchless translator and one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.”
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957, Cole has published several books of poems. They include Draw Me After (2022),Rift (1989), Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (2008), The Invention of Influence (2014), and Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (2017). With Adina Hoffman, he wrote the nonfiction volume Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2011). Described by Harold Bloom as a “major poet-translator,” Cole has translated important writers in Hebrew and Arabic, including Aharon Shabtai and Taha Muhammad Ali. He also edited and translated The Poetry of the Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (2012) and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (2007), a comprehensive rendering of the Hebrew poetry of the Spanish “Golden Age” into contemporary English.
Cole has received many honors and awards, among them fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He is the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a TLS Translation Prize, the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding Jewish literature, and the 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Cole divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches each spring at Yale University.