Selected Poems (Engelse vertaling)

xxviii INTRODUCTION

sonances and alliterations must sometimes be
abandoned as irreproducible. But the difficulty
of exact translation mostly arises from a deeper
cause, accruing not from the poet's failures
but from his successes, from his inspired choice
of words, from his mastery of style. Perhaps
we ought not to describe Jehudah Halevi's
Hebrew as easy. His simplicity is delusive.
But is not this true of all great lyrists? Masters
of song use the one right word, for which there
is no equivalent in their own or in any other
language. This mastery is not consistent, and
the greatest poets have their intermittences.
Jehudah Halevi is no exception. But Heine
describes him, and in the main with verity, as
one of the aristocracy of letters, possessing that
grace, in virtue of which "they who have it
cannot sin, not in verse nor yet in prose".
This quality is seen also in Ibn Gabirol, but in
Jehudah Halevi more organically. Both, for in-
stance, repeatedly employ biblical phraseology.
But with Ibn Gabirol the employment is that
of an artist, with Jehudah Halevi of a musician.
One sees Ibn Gabirol using a text for a final
touch of shape and colour; one hears Jehudah
Halevi working his texts into the very substance
of his harmony. From the Royal Crown one
might, without much mutilation of the structure,