‘Golden Age’ Poetry in Contemporary Israeli and Palestinian Poetry
This article is a small part of a research project dealing with the presence of Hebrew poetry from al-Andalus in Israeli culture in general and in Israeli poetry in particular. In spite of its indisputably canonic status and 800-year history as a central model for the writing of poetry, this magnifi...
| Published in: | European Review |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge University Press (CUP)
2008
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1062798708000136 https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1062798708000136 |
| Summary: | This article is a small part of a research project dealing with the presence of Hebrew poetry from al-Andalus in Israeli culture in general and in Israeli poetry in particular. In spite of its indisputably canonic status and 800-year history as a central model for the writing of poetry, this magnificent corpus is quite unknown to today’s readers, and its genres are obsolete. It is, as I shall explain, a ‘dinosaur-like’ canonic entity. The article contains some explanatory references to the historical trajectory of the poetry in question, from a central and active position to a marginal and passive presence – dealing with both the particular beneficial conditions in al-Andalus and current internal and external political situations. However, the paper is not about literary history or cultural politics. Rather, it focuses on the ways ‘dinosaur-like’ canonic status is revealed in the writing of contemporary poetry and in its readings. I begin with a short introduction concerned both with the poetry of al-Andalus and with the cognitive and inter-textual aspects related to the ‘dinosaur-like’ existence of texts and models. Owing to lack of space, I then deal with only three of the many characteristic features of this phenomenon: cognitive accessibility (illustrated by two readings of a Palestinian poem by Sami al-Kilani), manifested distancing (illustrated by Amnon Shamosh’s poem that converses with Yehuda Halevi), and modes of alluding (illustrated by a poem of Yehuda Amichai). |
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