Posts featuring Taha Muhammad Ali

Poetry’s Combinations and Doublings of Reality: An Interview with Peter Cole

November 17, 2025 | in Interviews | by Daniel Yadin

To translate is to listen past the statue and the slogans, until the poem’s raw anxiety and unexpected sympathy finally speak.

Peter Cole, a MacArthur Fellow and a Professor in the Practice at Yale, is a poet and a translator from Hebrew and Arabic. His past translation projects include the Hebrew poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain, the poetry of Kabbalah, and the works of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. In October, New York Review Books brought out On the Slaughter, Cole’s translated selection of poems by Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), the Ukrainian-born Jew who became not only the pre-eminent Hebrew poet of his time, but also the major cultural figure of both the Jewish diaspora and the nascent Jewish community in Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. Bialik is still regarded as something of the patron saint of modern Hebrew literature.

Recently, I paid Cole a visit in New Haven. Walking along the harbor, sitting over tea and dried apricots at his table, and, later, conversing over email, we discussed the mists surrounding the complex and contested figure of Bialik; October 7 and its genocidal aftermath in Gaza; how translation fits into the matrix of history, poetry, and ideology; and more.

Daniel Yadin (DY): I’d imagine that many of our readers are hearing about Bialik for the first time, though he’s an institution in the Jewish world. Bialik is the poet of modern Hebrew—at least, the granddad of the bunch. In your introduction to On the Slaughter, you talk about the ways in which you present a counter-reading of the poet. I agree you’re reading against the grain here. Would you say you’re also translating against the grain?

Peter Cole (PC): At the most basic level I’d say I was actually translating with the grain of the poetry—and certainly its granularity, since translation as I know and love it entails the slippery business of trying to give an honest, if fabricated, account of one’s readings and what Blake calls their minute particulars. That’s “fabricated” as in constructed or woven, a made thing.

DY: Almost tactile.

PC: Almost and then some. I’m trying to bring a compound of literary and historical alertness to my encounter with these poems. At the same time, I’m also translating against the grain of the received version of Bialik, who—as you note—was a titan of Hebrew poetry in a public way that may be hard for Americans to wrap their minds around. Some 100,000 people attended his 1934 funeral in Tel Aviv—which is to say, half of the Jewish population of British Mandatory Palestine.

From Palestine to Greece: A Translated Struggle

January 10, 2024 | in Essays | by Christina Chatzitheodorou

. . . utopias are not solely objects of fantasy but are objectives to be built and lived . . . at the intersection of art and revolution.

Palestine and Greece have long enjoyed a strong relationship of solidarity and friendship, fortified by mutual assistance during political tumults, expressions of recognition, and profound demonstrations towards peace and independence. In this essay, Christina Chatzitheodorou takes us through the literature that has continually followed along the history of this connection, and how translations from Arabic to Greek has advocated and enlivened the Palestinian cause in the Hellenic Republic.

Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was forced to leave the city. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, then fled Beirut for Tunisia, and, in fear of being captured or assassinated by Israel, he asked his Greek friend Andreas Papandreou for cover. The two had previously joined forces during the dictatorial regime in Greece known as Junta or the Regime of the Colonels, in which Arafat supported the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (Panellinio Apeleutherotiko Kinima/PAK) founded by Papandreou, and had also offered training in Middle Eastern camps to the movement’s young resistance fighters.

Arafat arrived then from war-torn Beirut to Faliron, in the south of Athens. He received a warm dockside reception by the then-Prime Minister Papandreou and other top government officials, as well as a small crowd consisting mostly of Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) members and Greece-based Palestinians, who stood by chanting slogans in support of the Palestinian cause. Papandreou called Arafat’s arrival in Athens a “historic moment” and assured him of Greece’s full support in the Palestinians’ struggle; after all, while Arafat was coming to Athens, accompanied by Greek ships, pro-Palestinian protests were taking place around the country almost every other day.

Although our support and solidarity with the Palestinian cause neither began nor stopped there, that day remains a powerful reminder of the traditional ties and friendship between Greek and Palestinian people. But more importantly, it comes in total contrast with the position of the current Greek government. Now, despite the short memories of politicians, it is the literature and translations of Palestinian works which continue to remind us of Greece’s historical solidarity to Palestine, particularly from left-wing and libertarian circles.