Two Poems

Translated by Gabriel Levin

Vida

Wherever he erred, HaGorni was the butt of malicious gossip, which he swore was all bunk and a great evil. And seeking to justify himself, this is what he told the haughty and scornful who’d cast aspersions at a just man, and he wrote down a collection [of poems] about all the districts of Provence and the towns in which he dwelled:

Yitzhak HaGorni came from Aire-sur-l’Adour in Gascony, as his Hebrew surname would suggest, since goren in Hebrew and aire in French etymologically refer to a threshing floor. Yitzhak, or Isaac the Threshing Floor. It is thought that HaGorni left Gascony shortly before the expulsion of the Jews of Gascony in 1287. Henceforth began his years of wandering in Provence and singing for his bread as a Hebrew-language jongleur, a title conferred uniquely to HaGorni in the annals of Hebrew letters. The towns mentioned in the eighteen extant poems – tucked away in a late-fifteenth-century manuscript in the Bayerische Staatsbibliotek in Munich – include Aix, Apt, Arles, Carpentras, Draguignan, Manosque, Lucq and Perpignan. In the last he would meet and declaim his poems late into the night to Avraham Bedersi, an established literary figure in the Jewish community, though more of a polemist and pedant than a poet. In the wake of their meeting, and the poet’s boast, ‘HaGorni is the prince of the princes of poetry, and Bedersi knows as much’, Bedersi unleashed a slew of vituperative verse against HaGorni only matched by the poet’s other recorded rival, Isaiah Ibn Devash, a young doctor who wrote: ‘For Gorni is, in fact, a threshing floor, strewn with worthless cut up thorns’. Why the ire? Why the accusations of drunkenness and womanizing? HaGorni’s own poetry was a high-flying mixture of grievances, rage and, in equal measure, boastfulness, albeit couched in a masterfully cadenced mono-rhymed Hebrew, which, like his Hebrew Andalusian predecessors, drew heavily on biblical allusions. As an outlier, an itinerant, ‘slung out from the hollow of a sling to wander’, HaGorni was certainly a thorn among Provençal Jews whose lives, however secure materially – a point HaGorni was acutely aware of – remained subject to the whims of the ruling class. But to call the poet a jongleur or troubadour is also to acknowledge that the poet’s literary jousts – tensos and sirventes joglaresc – his invectives, self-aggrandizements and hyperbolic language, may have been, not unlike that of his Occitan counterparts, more performative, more staged, more persona and geste, than a straightforward baring of the soul.


– Arles, a fortified city of old
   with its own lords and ladies. Protectress
to Israelites in distress, a stronghold for Gorni
   in times of trouble, its inhabitants decreeing
a fast when his native Aire was seized. And yet I rail
   against the high and mighty who claim I lust
after the courtesans, though I despise them and banish them
   from my sight, when I see them in my dreams
I wake in a sweat! Should they brush by me
   on the road – I quickly step aside; not daring to look
back – lest I turn into a pillar! I was dubbed Peleg,¹
   for the womenfolk peeled off as soon as I drew near.
Once a lover-boy, now a tramp, girls and their mothers
...