Selected Poems (Engelse vertaling)

INTRODUCTION xxiii

My soul is yearning unto thee—is yearning
From limits of the West.

The torrents heave from depths of passion,

At memory of thine olden state:
The glory of thee, borne away to exile,
Thy dwelling desolate.

Thus is force wedded to a beauty of form
which must give pause to all depreciation of
the medium. For in these Hebrew lines of
our poet, it is not merely the elegiac sentiment
that moves us; we are charmed equally by their
lyric grace.

Moreover, that Jehudah Halevi was a stylist
as well as a man of ideas, is shown by the fact
that, while his Hebrew is easily understood,
he is not easy to translate. This difficulty
sometimes arises from the exigencies of rhyme.
We are not attempting in this Introduction
to analyze Jehudah Halevi's poetical schemes, or
to discuss their relation to real or assumed Arabic
parallels. It must suffice to state that some of
these poetical schemes are very intricate, and
recondite terms are occasionally chosen, not
because those terms are the most suitable, but
because the rhyme, the acrostic, or the metre
demands them. The translator must sometimes
ignore these enforced expressions, just as as-