Accompanying “Five Poems from Kabbalah”, published in the spring issue of The Paris Review, is an online interview with translator, Peter Cole. His forthcoming book of translations from Hebrew, The Poetry of Kabbalah, will be published next year by YUP as part of the Margellos World Republic of Letters series.

Together with his wife, Adina Hoffman, Cole founded Ibis Editions, a small literary press based in Jerusalem, with a special dedication to publishing overlooked writing in the languages of the Levant region: Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, and other smaller languages. They are no strangers to literary patronage there; recently, Hoffman published the first (and only) biography of a Palestinian poet: My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, retelling the history of the village of Saffuriyya through the remembrance of native Taha Muhammad Ali, and Cole co-translated a volume of Ali’s work, So What, published by Copper Canyon Press.

On a related note, the North American edition of Philip Mansel’s Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, an historical survey of the cities of Smyrna, Alexandra, and Beirut, is about to be published by YUP. These three cities were financial and cultural centers of the region, and Mansel’s narrative begins with the sixteenth-century French alliance with the Ottoman Empire, showing how the cross-continental development of lingua franca was crucial to the Levant’s cosmopolitan role between Europe and Asia.

Like all good works of literature, these books show that language—specifically as an obstacle of translation—has undeniable impact on how foreign concepts are shaped and reinterpreted within cultural boundaries. How else could we hope to understand the abstract poetry that Cole notes for “its sheer potency and the steepness of its metaphysical ambition”?  We have writers, historians, and especially, translators to thank.