Shame about the hideous typeface. Otherwise a handsome volume with Hebrew and English translation on facing pages. Nice illustrated endpapers with the Synagogue at the back and a reconstruction of what the Jewish quarter may have looked like at the front, showing who lived in each house. It doesn’t match V. D. Lipman’s reconstruction. I’m inclined to trust Lipman.

Good introduction.

The translation is apparently dynamically equivalent. Flows well for the most part. Good rhythms. Not overly fussy and some passages of beauty:

“Afire with longing for the rains of Love,
here I am, thirsty in my inner heart;
with dew drops of desire the folk are fed,
I too, perhaps, will sip a lover’s cup.”

I understand that the poems display some technical virtuosity that can’t be replicated in English. Acrostics and so forth. What does come across is something of Meir the man. Again and again he comes back to themes and images of divisions and boundaries; whether the divisions between night and day in the opening poem or divisions between people, good and bad in something like “Put a Curse on My Enemy”. I don’t get the impression that Meir was a very happy man. He doesn’t seem to have much faith in people, but he does have faith in God. There’s another division there, between the sacred and the profane.

You also get some insight into what it must have been like to be a Jew living in a hostile country and then being expelled.

I took the foe/destroyer in the poem “From the Counsel of Rabbi Meir” to be the English. There’s a sort of siege mentality going on there.

I think “Who is Like You?” is about the expulsion. The first 57 lines are acrostic and recount the creation and Adam and Eve. Precisely at the point where the acrostic ends he talks about the expulsion of Cain and goes on to the escape from Egypt towards the Promised Land.

All in all a valuable and unique insight into a man and a group of people who otherwise left us records only of their business transactions. ( )