readings in medieval hebrew poetry || poet and patron: ibn gabirol's poem of the palace and its...

Poet and Patron: Ibn Gabirol's Poem of the Palace and Its GardensAuthor(s): RAYMOND P. SCHEINDLINSource: Prooftexts, Vol. 16, No. 1, Readings in Medieval Hebrew Poetry (JANUARY 1996), pp.31-47Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689438 .

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RAYMOND P. SCHEINDLIN

Poet and Patron: Ibn Gabirol's Poem of the Palace

and Its Gardens

THE ANDALUSIAN HEBREW PANEGYRIC, like its model, the Arabic panegyric, is normally composed of two parts. In the first, the poet begins with descriptive or evocative themes that are conventionally regarded as

appropriate to the introductory section; then, by means of a transition

passage (known by the Arabic term takhallus), which he attempts to make as smooth as possible, he leads the auditor or reader to the second part, the praise of the patron, which is the main business of the poem. The poet himself is not prohibited from putting in an appearance: he may mention his sorrow at being separated from the patron, his gratitude for the

patron's past benefactions, his love for the patron's character, his admira tion for the patron's pedigree, or his awe at the patron's power. But the attitude appropriate for the poet himself, should he choose to appear in

the panegyric, is modesty, even servility. One of the distinctive features of the poetry of the Hebrew Golden

Age is the frequently outspoken voice of the poet; even in the panegyric qas?da, we can sometimes hear the poet's voice calling to us from behind the mask of conventional language and imagery. The reading proposed here of Ibn Gabirol's famous poem to an unnamed patron, 3 11VT nr?

, will lead to a glimpse of the image that the poet has fashioned for himself.1

1

The poem describes a visit to the patron's palace and its magnificent gardens. We will visit the poem as one might visit a large park, beginning

PROOFTEXTS16 (1996): 31-47 ? 1996 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



32 RAYMOND P. SCHEINDLIN

with a quick walk through it to get an idea of the shape of the whole,

going through it again slowly to identify the individual plants and trees, and then returning to contemplate one particularly engaging spot. Later, we will reflect on what this kind of analysis tells us about the true subject of our inquiry, the distinctive self-image created by the poet.

The poem falls into the two parts typical of the classical panegyric qastda. The opening description of the palace and its gardens constitutes the largest section of the poem, occupying verses 1 to 32; the takhallus occurs in verses 33 and 34; and the panegyric occupies the poem's last ten

verses, 34 to 44. The poem begins with the poet's voice inviting his friend to join him

in a springtime expedition to an estate outside the town (w. 1-4). The

description of the estate occupies the rest of the first part (w. 5-32), and includes passages describing the description of the palace (w. 5-11), its dome (w. 12-17), and its patio with its fountain (w. 18-20) and garden beds (w. 21-32).

Let us follow the speaker's voice. He begins his opening invitation in

the first-person singular, but as early as the end of the verse, his identity has already been swallowed up in the plural, as he anticipates the scenes

of the countryside in spring that he and his friend are about to enjoy together. Having effaced himself by merging into first-person plural in the opening lines, he almost disappears once he reaches the palace and

begins describing it.2 He calls attention to himself again briefly in verse 9a in a parenthetical comment expressing astonishment at the number of

rooms, and again with greater emphasis in verses 16-17, when he exclaims with astonishment and delight at the dome. He does not appear

again until the takhallus, verses 33-34, where he launches the panegyric section by using a verb in the imperative; thereafter, he does not refer to himself again.

The friend addressed in verse 1 also disappears from the poem. We are surprised to note that, after all the first-person plural verbs in verse 1, he is already absent by verse 9, where the first-person verb is in the

singular. By the time we get to verse 16, the next occurrence of the first

person, we have probably forgotten the friend altogether. When the poet next addresses someone, using the imperative twice in the transition

verses, it is not to address the friend but to address the sun. Actually, the friend has not simply been dropped, but replaced by a superior being. He

who was addressed at the opening of the poem as a "friend of the luminaries" is now replaced at the beginning of the second part as the

object of the speaker's address by the great luminary itself. Yet even this

luminary turns out to be only the middle member of a series of three, for it is only addressed in order to be told that it is surpassed in brilliance by the patron. Thus, one of the poem's organizing principles is a competition



Ibn Gabirol's Poem of the Palace and Its Gardens 33

among the three luminaries. We will eventually come to see the poet as the manager and manipulator of this competition. But the route to this

understanding lies through the poem and the scenes it describes.

2

Let us turn back to the descriptive part of the poem and examine its

components. The motion is from outdoors (country) to indoors (chambers and dome) and again outdoors (fountain and patio), as correctly pointed out by M. Itzhaki;3 but the language of the poem suggests another, correlated motion. Starting out on a beautiful spring day, we proceed from the shadow under the trees (w. 3-4) to the dark chambers (w. 8-11), to the night sky represented by the dome (w. 12-14), to the light of that same night sky, the feature about the dome that really makes an impres sion upon the speaker. Then we move on to the light of the morning scene in the patio (w. 18-32), to the moment when the sun rises overhead in the takhallus. In other words, we move with the poem from light to darkness and back to light.4

In this motion in and out of darkness, the dome is pivotal, not only because it is the midpoint, but also because it embodies elements of both darkness and of light. Verse 13 particularly plays with this bipolarity. By day, the hall under the dome is dark, and the light from the dome speckles the walls and the floor below; the speaker compares this real light favorably to jewels. Since the light is constantly shifting and changing in the course of the daily cycle, the motion of the gleaming patches on walls and floor gives the impression that the dome rotates as the sky appears to do. By night, the room is illuminated not by the sun but by artificial stars?the lamps hanging from the dome and the stars formed by the intersections of arabesque designs on its interior surface. These effects can

still be seen in the Hall of the Ambassadors and in the Hall of the Two Sisters in the Alhambra. The dome and dome-hall represent another set of

completely artificial luminaries that owe their existence to the patron's wealth and grand spirit. No wonder the speaker finds himself trans

ported as he contemplates the dome. He is stunned not merely by the dome's beauty but by his own sudden grasp of its meaning, as he realizes that the patron has the power to create his own artificial sky and luminaries to rival the real ones.5

But having agreed with Itzhaki that the description of the dome is a

key moment, even a pivotal one, I must now depart from her interpreta tion of the larger poetic structure in which it is embedded. Itzhaki

interprets the dome scene as the midpoint in an a-b-a structure; when we come out from under the dome and enter the garden, we are returning to



34 RAYMOND R SCHEINDLIN

the outdoors, where we had started. To me, it seems that this interpreta tion has the effect of stopping the motion of the poem in the middle; it

implies that the patio passage, the transition, and the praise of the patron are simply tacked on to a closed entity consisting of the description of a

garden and a palace. Such an interpretation suits Itzhaki's perspective, for her book is a study of garden imagery in medieval Hebrew poetry; for

her, the interesting part of the poem ends with the garden scene. But the

poem goes on for a long while after we emerge from under the dome.

Furthermore, the outdoor scene that follows the dome passage is not about the same outdoors as was described at the poem's beginning; it is not the real outdoors at all, and therefore not really a return.

For the scene following, the dome passage does not take place on the hills or plains surrounding the palace but in an interior patio. The passage through the domed hall is an important moment in the motion toward that patio, but only a moment. The emergence of the speaker into the light is the continuation of linear motion. And the patio scene itself, while long, is not static, nor does it look back to the beginning of the poem, but rather, forward; it is in motion toward the poem's real focal point, which is still to come, toward the climax that is to occur in the takhallus. The dome and the

patio scenes both serve to set up the poem's repertoire of imagery so that we will recognize the real point when we come to it.

Itzhaki bases her a-b-a analysis on the central position in the poem occupied by the dome and on the fact that a large number of verses (six) are devoted to it. But the dome passage appears to her to be centrally placed only because she sees the poem as ending effectively with verse

25, which she understands to be the end of the garden description.6 If we think of the poem primarily not as a description of a palace and a

garden but as a panegyric, our sense of its proportions will be quite different, and we will immediately identify the patio scene as the central

passage. As for length, at fifteen verses, the patio scene surpasses the dome passage by far.

We readers whose taste has been shaped by modern European literature tend to approach panegyric with the prejudice that it is insincere and boring. We are more at home in the opening section of the classical qas?da, with its evocations of love, nature descriptions, and other

more palatable themes.7 But if we want to understand Ibn Gabirol's poem and the literary mind it represents, we have to adopt its author's cultural

assumptions and take its panegyric seriously. We have to take as our

starting point the fact that, however much the poem deals with palaces and gardens, it is really about a patron.

The artistic challenge faced by the author of Hebrew panegyric poetry is to praise his patron in a way that will do credit to the patron and to himself, employing the conventions of the qastda inherited from




Arabic.8 Even within the framework of these conventions, there are many

ways to approach the task. Some poets were content with the segmented qas?da, passing from one theme to another in ways that elude Western readers' attempts to discover unity. Our poem belongs to a different

qastda-type. Though composed of a number of sections dealing with

different themes, the first part is unified by the linear motion of the scenes described, and these in turn are designed to prepare the auditor/reader for the takhallu? and the praise of the patron that follows. By regarding the

panegyric part merely as a formal requirement rather than as the poem's raison d'?tre, we risk misinterpreting the poem's structure and under

valuing the poet's artistry. But within the descriptive part of the poem, the dome passage is an

important moment, even a pivotal one, for it adumbrates the idea that

through his artificial creations, the patron has demonstrated his control over and superiority to nature. The patron shows his power over nature

by creating with his wealth, spirit, and good taste, an artificial world to

rival the real one. Under the dome, the theme is stated for the first time, and the speaker underscores it by interjecting his own feelings into verses

16 and 17. To see how the theme is developed in the course of the poem, we have to keep on reading.

In our passage through the palace, the dome chamber serves as a

vestibule to the patio. Emerging from the darkness of the dome-hall, we

enter not simply the light, but a distinct part of the palace complex, the site destined to be the center of the poem's main action and interest. On

the level of poetic structure, we enter into a passage that is tightly unified

by a kind of chiastic construction. Verses 18-26 describe a series of items, each of which is matched in verses 28-34 with a counterpart in reverse

order. Moving from the center of the passage outward, we have the series:

flowers, birds, gazelles/deer, lions/master:

v. 18 lions -

v. 21 deer -1

v. 25 birds -1

v. 26 buds -1

v. 28 henna-flowers -'

v. 29 doves -'

v. 31 gazelles -'

V.34 the patron




The dome passage is followed immediately by the fountain passage. We do not need to dwell on this famous piece of description. Like the

dome, it is royal imagery with antecedents in Arabic poetry and architec

ture, as Bargebuhr correctly saw. We also do not need to dwell on his

false interpretation of the verses describing the fountain. The structure

described here is an ordinary lion fountain, consisting of lions standing by a pool and pouring water into it from their mouths. Such zoomorphic fountains were common in Muslim Spain; a pair of lion fountains at the

edge of a pool is found in the Alhambra itself, in the Garden of the Partal, only a few paces from the Court of Lions.9 There is no reason to assume, with Bargebuhr, that the fountain described here resembles the one now

found in the Patio de los Leones, which in its present form is probably three centuries later than Ibn Gabir l.10

The feature of the fountain that is structurally significant for our

poem is that, like the dome, it consists of nature in manufactured form, artificial nature mixed with natural nature. This is the theme that will link dome and fountain to the succeeded section, the patio passage. The artificial lions give way to artificial does (v. 21), which also serve as

fountains, interacting with real nature in the garden beds, and, by vivifying them with their water, actually surpassing it. Here is another case of the artificial surpassing the natural. In the following description, in which the text is unfortunately not perfectly established, and therefore not entirely clear, it actually becomes difficult to distinguish the real creatures from the artificial ones. Are the birds chirping in the boughs (v. 25) real birds in trees, or stone birds carved into stylized arabesque trees, such as are found here and there in Andalusian architecture?11 If it seems odd that stone birds should be said to be singing, that is no odder than having the flowers speak in verse 28; in fact, it is rather more natural, since real birds utter sounds.

But the most important thing that happens in verses 18-32 is that the artificial and the natural become mixed up with each other. We saw this confusion beginning to occur in verse 18, when the stone lions were

described as roaring, with the implication that the water pouring from their mouths represents their speech in a form that is visible and tangible, besides being audible. That this is the meaning of the water emerging from the lions' mouths is confirmed by architectural descriptions in

Arabic poetry. The water emitted by bird fountains is similarly inter

preted as visible chirping in Arabic poetry.12 Thus, Ibn Gabir l represents the inanimate as animate, and the nonrational as rational,13 until, before

we know it, we are in the middle of a quarrel among the nonhuman inhabitants of the patron's garden, a quarrel that is audible only to the

literary imagination.14




The passage describing this quarrel, verses 25-32, is utterly remark able in several ways.

While competitive debates among animals and among inanimate

objects, whether in poetry, prose, or in rhymed prose, are a common feature of Arabic literature, they are rare in the Hebrew literature of the

Arabic-speaking world.15 In Ibn Gabirol's other works, I have so far found

only two comparable debates. One comes from a poem describing a

garden; though consisting of but a single line, it is very similar in spirit to our passage. It reads, *$$ *j?? ^jf "u^Jir? / o W| nuy?7} $) ("The turtledove, swallow, and crane16 arose to boast over the doves of the

canals"): the disputants are all birds and the debate is merely between different species. The other example occurs in a wine poem in which the

personified wine rebukes the poet for comparing it to the sun for radiance; the sun, the wine points out, is naked, while the wine is clothed in crystal: w?| ^y / nlK1? 9# ̂ nyn $) ("How can you compare the sun to my light, when I am superior to the sun when I come

forth?"). A third quarrel for preeminence may be implicit in Ibn Gabirol's enigmatic poem describing a bowl of flowers; here he imagines the flowers coming before him for judgment, as the three goddesses came before Paris on Mount Ida:

n?tnsp ri? V^iarin dji / tp ny? nl ^yri ̂7? w?*?T| / nm ?xjp

and when they were untied before me in the bowl and mixed in it as if in heaps

it was as if they were jealous of each other and brought their complaint before me.17

In Arabic competitive debates, a very common pair of disputants is the pen and the sword; these are usually thought to represent the administrative and military arms of government, and are therefore two items of the same order. The comparability of the other pairs of items

commonly juxtaposed in such literary debates is even more obvious: sword and lance; gold and glass; heaven and earth; female and male

slaves, coffee and q?t (a mildly narcotic herb). Also quite common are debates between the narcissus and the rose. This comparison was intro duced to Arabic poetry by the Abbasid poet Ibn al-R?m? (d. c. 896),18 though not in the form of a dispute between the flowers themselves. Ibn al-R?m?'s poem, favoring the narcissus, elicited a response in favor of the rose by al-Sanaubar? (d. 945 or 946), whose poem actually is a dispute between the flowers themselves. Two Andalusian Arabic prose writers,

contemporaries of Ibn Gabir l, took up the competition between the rose and the narcissus, using the debate form. They were ab? Haf? Ahmad b. Burd (Cordoba, d. 1053/54), who composed a literary prose piece in




which five species of flower, personified, agree upon the preeminence of the rose; and ab?'l-Wal?d al-Himyar? (Seville, d. c. 1048), who composed a

sequel in which the flowers, after debating among themselves, agree to swear loyalty to the narcissus.19

Our passage is certainly related to these Hebrew and Arabic texts, but its similarity to them is less important than the differences: our text

depicts a debate between flowers, birds, and deer, and grows to take in the stone or metal statues, a human being (the patron), and even the sun and the other luminaries. The competitors are representatives of different orders of being. Our debate crosses the boundaries of genus; all Arabic and Hebrew competitive debates so far known to me stay within that

boundary, comparing species within a single genus. The distinction is no arbitrary one, nor is it anachronistically based on

modern biological taxonomy; rather, it is rooted in medieval conceptions of the universe. The patio contains representatives of all categories of

being identified in medieval thought. The creatures that start the

dispute?the flowers, birds, and deer?represent the realms of the vege table and animal; beyond them stands the patron, representing man, and

beyond him, the luminaries, representing the spheres. Below them lies the stone or metal of the garden's statuary, representing the realm of the inanimate. Thus, the patio actually contains a microcosm of the universe, a microcosm in which the poet imagines a competitive spirit with each

part vying for supremacy. The debate in our poem does not stop at crossing the boundaries of

genus; it also crosses the boundary of reality, for the flowers are real, the birds may or may not be, and the deer are certainly made of stone.

I can find no precedent for such a debate in Arabic or Hebrew literature. A single Arabic literary debate between different orders of

being, dating from the thirteenth century, is known by title,20 so our

passage is rare enough on that score alone. But a debate that pits the real creatures against depictions of creatures seems to be an isolated case, an

astounding act of creativity on the part of Ibn Gabir l. That Ibn Gabir l should have chosen to introduce a competitive

debate into a panegyric qastda, even if it were the typical kind of competitive debate, is noteworthy. The comparisons between pen and sword and between the narcissus and the rose introduced into the Arabic

panegyric qastda by Ibn al-R?n? are made in the poet's voice, not in debate between the items themselves.21 Nor is even this kind of compari son at all common in the panegyric qastda. The thematic repertoire of such

qas?das is well established, and we do not often find such a significant deviation from the standard inventory of themes.

Another remarkable feature of this passage is its emphasis on sounds. The debate between the creatures introduces a sonic element into the




poem that was not present in the earlier parts of the description, though it was hinted at in verse 2 with its mention of the birds heralding the spring. In the patio passage, the sounds are introduced gradually, so that at first we pay them no special attention, for the birds singing in the boughs in verse 25 are standard equipment of spring poetry, and nnxann in verse 27 only implies speech. But with the word Dn?lKl in verse 28, and the words prurn rmmn in verse 29, the speech becomes more and more

stressed, more and more raucous, and these sounds hold the center of our

attention through the repetition of the verb in verse 32 and the actual quotation of the words of the speakers in the passage, climaxing with the oral intervention of the poet in verse 33 with his peremptory on.

Finally, this passage gradually shifts our attention away from the

patron's palace and garden; by the time it ends, we have forgotten about the original theme and purpose of the poem. What brings the cacophony to an end is the speech of the poet, whom we had also completely forgotten. He now steps into the poem to interrupt the action, stop the

debate, and restore the patron to the center of the discussion. In light of these points, we may consider this section of the poem its

most original part. It is a parade example of Ibn Gabirol's independence as a manipulator of the poetic tradition.22

3

We are now ready to have a look at the takhallus. The creatures of the

garden have spent the morning bickering, and the sun has reached the

zenith; now the poet peremptorily stops the sun in its course and silences the garden by pronouncing the single Hebrew word on. This word embraces two meanings. Ordinarily, it means "silence," but it is used to

mean "halt!" in one of the most famous passages in the Bible, the story of the celebrated miracle at Ai, when Joshua halted the sun in its course with the words: D*n fWttn tema;.23 Appropriating the words of the prophet, the

poet bids the sun stop its motion around the world. He is as much as

saying, "Stop thinking that it is you who dominates and gives life to the world; concede that my patron is your better!" But the command takes in

the bickering creatures of the garden as well. As the sun is stopped in its

motion, they are thrown into silence by the thought of and in homage to their all-powerful patron, who "darkens the sun with light as bright as

that of the luminaries." The poet's cry, with its two meanings, silences the creatures of the

garden and stops the sum, but it does something else as well: it calls attention to the poet. He has appeared till now only to profess weakness and humility, as is appropriate for one who offers praise, telling us about




himself only that he was unable to count the number of gates, and then that he was emotionally transported by the sight of the dome. But that

humility is revealed to be no more than a pose, when, after keeping silent

for eighteen long verses, he intervenes vocally; not in the palace, not in

the dome, not in the patio, but in the very heavens, he asserts his own

power over the great luminary. The patron can build palaces, domes, fountains, and patios, including

all their varied fauna and flora, a very cosmos; he can rival the sun. But

the poet can do more: he can stop the sun in its course and, as a side effect, silence the patron's unruly garden as well. By bursting so abruptly and

vocally into the scene, exploding it, and replacing it with his own voice, he reminds us that it was he who created it in the first place; the patron may have built the material palace and garden, but only the poet could animate it and give it meaning. The palace and the garden and all the

inhabitants thereof are nothing but a mute body until and unless the poet lends them an animating soul.

The poet's implicit claim to be the palace's real builder lends weight to his references to Solomon, which now have to be understood as being

more than routine biblical allusions or playful references to his own

name. The poem's first reference to Solomon is in the passage describing the dome as a copy of the night sky, possibly an allusion to a traditional

story according to which Pharaoh's daughter spread over Solomon's

marriage bed a tapestry so ornamented as to resemble the night sky.24 The second is the comparison of the basin to that of Solomon's temple. But in a

larger way, the entire poem rests on the Jewish and the Islamic traditions

according to which Solomon used his power over the g?nies to order the construction of palaces. The theme is found already in the Quran and is elaborated on in Islamic exegetical and legendary texts; it was probably even known to Arabs in pre-Islamic times, since there is a reference to it in an early poem.25 It is often alluded to in later Arabic panegyric poetry, in which palaces depicted in verse are said to rival those built by Solomon; Ibn Gabirol's use of the motif is in the tradition of such Arabic

panegyrics.26 One feature of the palace that King Solomon ordered built for himself,

according to both Islamic and Jewish accounts, corresponds in a striking way to an important feature of our poem. Solomon's palace contained a

room with a glass floor so artfully made that it resembled water, and so

realistic that the queen of Sheba lifted her skirt while crossing it so that it would not get wet. The point of the story is that the biblical Solomon could imitate nature so well that his creations could not be distinguished from nature itself; and this is the very illusion intended by the patio passage of our poem, the work of an eleventh-century Solomon. In trying to understand the poet's train of thought, we must not overlook his




explicit and implicit references to his royal namesake, nor forget the

penchant of medieval Hebrew poets for attaching their lives to those of their biblical eponyms.27

That Ibn Gabirol's imagination should have led him to portray himself as creator, animator, giver of life, is confirmed from many directions. Recent studies of Ibn Gabir l have called attention to his interest in Sefer yetsira, proposing that this interest had to do not merely

with the book's theoretical cosmological doctrine but with its potential use as a handbook for creating a living being. Yehuda Liebes has

expounded brilliantly Ibn Gabirol's ideas about creation and proposed an

interpretation of his liturgical poem IV w, according to which the poem hints at an ambition to engage in acts of creation. Liebes finds this theme

metaphorically present also in Ibn Gabirol's notoriously opaque poem " E ranxD a ; and as he points out, even folklore has preserved

or constructed a memory of Ibn Gabir l as the creator of a golem. A study of several of Ibn Gabirol's poems by Sara Katz points to similar themes in his personal poetry and discusses Ibn Gabirol's reputation in Jewish folklore as a sorcerer. Both papers call attention to Ibn Gabirol's identifica tion with King Solomon, the magician.28

With the word on, the poet reveals himself to be the Solomon who created this magic poetic palace and its garden, a kind of wizard who uses

words to lend to inert things life and animation. He is a kind of Prospero who manipulates nature for his own needs, willing the palace with its

gardens and appurtenances into being and willing them away. It is an

effect that is captured artfully in the story of the sorcerer found in Isaac Ibn Sahula's *>mnpr? bv??2 (thirteenth century), in which the protagonist's (as well as the reader's) sense of time is effectively manipulated by the author. Ibn Sahula's sorcerer creates a whole imaginary life for the

protagonist, a life that seems to both protagonist and reader to last a

number of years, but whose actual duration is but the twinkling of an eye. When the sorcerer cruelly (both for the protagonist and the reader) sweeps it away and the truth is revealed, the protagonist can only exclaim: "God Himself has taught you all this.... You have the power to create winged fantasies and to place them wherever you wish. But just take a drink and swallow it?the fantasies vanish as if they never were.29 Ibn Gabirol's retraction of the fantasy is similar, but far less harsh. Having swept away the garden with his speech, he turns his attention to the

patron, willing him and his power into being with his panegyric just as he had done with the palace and its gardens. But what will he do next?

The patron wants to think that he has erected a real palace for

eternity. He loves to hear his power compared to that of the sun and moon and stars and ocean, standard material for Hebrew and Arabic

panegyric poetry. But the palace he has built has no meaning until the



42 raymond p. scheindlin

poet invests it with meaning; the material palace is not nearly as real as its

representation in poetry. Furthermore, the palace will inevitably crumble, but the poem has at least the theoretical potential of achieving eternal life.

The landscape of Arabic literature is littered with ruined palaces. Not

only are ruins often described in ancient Arabic poetry, but real ruins could be observed in Ibn Gabirol's al-Andalus. Mad?nat al-Zahr?3, the fabled palace-city built just outside Cordoba by cAbd al-Rahm?n III in the tenth century, and al-Mad?na al-Z?hira, built later in the same century by the vizier al-Mans?r b. ab? cAmir, had just been destroyed when Ibn

Gabir l was born and were commemorated in Arabic verse by Muslim

poets who were his contemporaries and countrymen. The miserable ruins

of Mad?nat al-Zahr?5 are being excavated and can be visited today, but even the site of al-Mad?na al-Z?hira is now forgotten.

Thus, the poet's D*n not only introduces the praise of the patron, but it also whispers a threat; it reveals the poet's true estimation of the balance of power. Having proclaimed that the patron has erected the palace, but that only the poet can invest it with life, this imperative reminds the

patron that only the poet can make him immortal, and hints that the poet can withdraw his gifts at will. With that, the poet retires from the scene, effaces himself as he ought to do, as he chooses to do for now, and

launches the panegyric proper. He ends the poem by conceding?for the

present?that his patron is the equal of all creation. The paradox that the poet's power is greater than that of his patron is

an old theme in world literature, though it has not been explored in Arabic.30 It suits well Ibn Gabirol's literary persona as we know it from his other poems. Metaphors connoting his conception of himself as creator of a higher, eternal reality are scattered throughout his oeuvre, as in the line, "?to nm own / nun ^

t?kt ("Why should I fear the

daughters of days [i.e., the vicissitudes of time], when the days them selves are the daughters of my words?")31 Even in his religious poetry, Ibn

Gabir l adopts an unexpectedly strong voice, exploring the implications of the current philosophical conception of the divine nature of the human soul in an assertive way that contrasts notably with other poets writing in the same genres, sometimes pushing against the limits of liturgical propriety. In a study of his reshuyot, I have pointed to his tendency to employ rhetoric both to measure himself against God and to elevate himself to a kind of equilibrium with God. These tendencies seem related to Ibn Gabirol's neo-Platonic belief in the divine character of the human soul. Ibn Gabir l builds many of his reshuyot on the paradoxes that arise from this affinity between worshiper and worshiped, with results analo

gous to the relationship between poet and patron that animate the poem of the palace and the garden.32 Thus, both secular and religious poetry




reflect a single cast of mind that shapes and permeates his work on many subjects.

That a single literary imagination informs both Ibn Gabirors secular and his sacred poetry is signaled by an image that links our poem with one of his most important poems on prayer. The poet who in our

panegyric fancies the water rushing from the mouths of stone lions to be a

tangible representation of the lions' roar is the very same Ibn Gabir l

who, in his religious verse, imagines his poem as the overflow of his soul

rushing out of the confining space of his body and emerging in the form of words.33 Shared by a magnificent religious poem and a magnificent secular poem, this image is a hint and a reminder to us that Ibn Gabirol's true source is neither philosophy nor literary traditions of East or West but a distinctive literary imagination that informs all of his creative work.

Department of Jewish Literature The Jewish Theological Seminary of America

NOTES

1. The poem appears in Shelomo Ibn Gabir l: shirei haltol, ed. Hayim Brody and Hayim Schirmann (Jerusalem, 1974), pp. 134-35 (poem no. 107), and in Schirmann, Hashirah haHvrit

biSfarad uveProvans, 2d ed. (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I960), vol. 1, pp. 223-25; it has been

translated by F. Bargebuhr, TheAlhambra: A Cycle of Studies on the Eleventh Century in Moorish Spain (Berlin, 1968), pp. 97-101 (ramer free, and, in the passage describing the fountain,

w. 18-20, tendentious); Angel Saenz-Badillos in El alma lastimada: Ibn Gabir l (Cordoba, 1992), pp. 59-62; and by me in The Qasida, ed. Stefan Speri, 1996 (foit?coirang). I touched on the poem in Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 7-8, giving a tentative translation of w. 18-33 and a one-sentence characterization

of that passage containing the germ of mis paper. The thesis set forth here is also touched on

briefly in my paper "The Hebrew Qasida in Spain/' in The Qasida, in which this poem is

compared with a garden poem by Judah Halevi, r?j#1* nrnn rrfaiy yjK. For the conventions of the Hebrew panegyric qas?da, see Dan Pagis, Shirat hahol vetorat hashir leMoshe ibn Ezra uvene

doro (Jerusalem, 1970), pp. 151-96.

2. At the same time, the tense shifts from future?which the speaker uses in anticipa tion of the pleasures of the journey?to present, speaking of his delight as he actually observes the scenes. Both of these shifts pivot around a single word, r?w, in v. 5. This word

looks and sounds like a continuation of the series of verbs in the first-person plural, but is

actually a ni fal participle in the present tense, as dictated by the context. It thus reflects both the temporary disappearance of the two travelers from the poem and the shift from the

description of anticipated pleasures to the description of pleasures actually being experienced.

3. Masha Itzhaki, Ele ginat ha'arugot [Toward the garden beds] (Tel Aviv, 1988), pp. 28-33. That the motion of the poem is outdoors-indoors-outdoors is her assumption when she mentions the poem in passing in her article "In Praise of the Fruit of the Garden's Trees: Three Possible Readings of a Maqama," [Hebrew] in Mehqarim besifrut 'am Yisra'el uvetarbut teman: sefer hayovel kprofesor Yehuda Ratshabi [Studies in Hebrew literature and




Yemenite culture: Jubilee volume presented to Yehuda Ratzhaby], ed. Yehudit Dishon and

Ephraim Hazan (Ramat Gan, 1991), pp. 307-18.

4. It would be interesting to investigate whether the segmentation of the poem, as it is

analyzed here, can be confirmed by the techniques of analysis developed by H?mori in his article in this volume.

5. Pictures of the star-decorations in the ceiling of the Hall of the Ambassadors in Oleg Grabar, The Alhambra, 2d ed. (Sebastopol, Calif., 1992), p. 48. For a discussion of the cosmic

symbolism of the two halls in the Alhambra mentioned here, see ibid., pp. 113-25. As

evidence for this interpretation, Grabar cites our passage from Ibn Gabir l from Bargebuhr, The Alhambra, p. 98, as well as passages from Arabic poetry. To these may be added a

panegyric on al-Mu?ta?im Ibn ?um?dih, ruler of Almer?a, in Ibn al-Hadd?d (d. 1087), Diwan,

ed. Y?suf cAl? Taw?l (Beirut, 1990), no. 58 (pp. 265-78), w. 27-31; another panegyric by Ibn Hamdls, describing a palace of Mans?r ibn A'i? al-n?s of Bougie in Maqqar?, Nafh al-t?b min

ghusn al-andalus al-ratib, ed. Ihs?n 'Abb?s (Beirut, 1988), vol. 1, p. 492.

6. Itzhaki, Ele ginat ht?arugot, p. 30. 7. This discomfort is well described and accounted for by Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval

Persian Court Poetry (Princeton, 1987), p. 42, with reference to Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The

Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago and London, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 297-98. For Arabic, see Stefan Speri, "Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric

Poetry in the Early Ninth Century," Journal of Arabic Literature 8 (1977): 20-35, esp. pp. 33-34. 8. Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, pp. 42-43, writing of Persian, whose poetry

is related to Arabic in ways partially analogous to Hebrew, also sees the conventions as an

artistic challenge, though she expresses it slightly differently. 9. For pictures of zoomorphic fountains, see Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Al-Andalus: The Art of

Islamic Spain (New York, 1992): lion fountain in the Garden of the Partal, p. 148; elephant fountain, p. 170; stag fountain, p. 210; a griffin that may have served as a fountain, p. 216;

another lion fountain, p. 270. Arabic literary descriptions of fountains in the form of lions and other animals abound; they have been collected by Mar?a Jes?s Rubiera, La arquitectura en la literatura ?rabe: datos para una est?tica del placer (Madrid, 1988); see also D. Fairchild

Ruggles, "The Gardens of the Alhambra and the Concept of the Garden in Islamic Spain" in

Dodds, Al-Andalus, pp. 163-71; idem, "Fountains and Miradors: Architectural Imitation and

Ideology among the Taifas," in K?nstlerischer Austauch: Akten des XXVIII Internationalen

Kongresses f?r Kunstgeschichte, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin, 1992), pp. 391-406. For a

fountain in the shape of a horse in tenth-century Iran, see the account of R. Nathan the

Babylonian in Adolf Neubauer, Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles and Chronological Notes, 2 vols.

(Oxford, 1887), 1:79; the Arabic original was recently published by Menahem Ben-Sasson in

his article "The Structure, Purposes, and Contents of the Work by Rabbi Nathan the

Babylonian," [Hebrew] in Tarbut vehevra betoledot Yisra'el bime habenayim: qoves ma'amarim

lezikhro shel Hayim Hilel Ben-sason, ed. R. Bonf?, M. Ben-Sasson, and Y. Hacker (Jerusalem,

1988-89), pp. 137-96.

10. In my foAcoming article "El poema de Ibn Gabir l y la fuente de los leones," Cuadernos de la Alhambra 29, I have, I hope, refuted Bargebuhr's interpretation and

hypothesis definitively. But because Bargebuhr's interpretation has become standard in

literature on the Alhambra, and because my article is to appear in Spanish, it seems

appropriate to summarize the discussion here.

Bargebuhr's starting point was the comparison of the fountain with the basin in

Solomon's temple, which he interpreted as meaning that our fountain resembled Solomon's

"sea," or basin, in every respect except that the cattle that supported Solomon's basin were

replaced by lions. Bargebuhr therefore imagined Ibn Gabirol's basin as being borne by lions, which in turn poured water into a pool at their feet, like the Fountain of Lions in the

Alhambra; this led him to conclude that the Fountain of Lions is the very fountain described




in the poem. Since Yehosef Ibn Naghr?lla, a contemporary of Ibn Gabir l, is known from

other sources to have built a palace on the Alhambra mountain, Bargebuhr concluded that

Ibn Gabirol's poem describes a fountain in that palace; that Ibn Gabirol's unnamed patron was Yehosef Ibn Naghralla; and that the fountain of the poem is essentially identical with the Fountain of Lions that still stands in the Court of Lions.

Against Bargebuhr, I point out that Ibn Gabirol's words una by aanai state as

clearly and unambiguously as possible that the lions in the poem stand at the side of the "sea" and pour water into it; the "sea" in the poem must therefore be a pool set in the

ground rather than a basin carried on the shoulders of the beasts. The structure of the

fountain described in the poem is the same as that of the fountains cited in the preceding note. Bargebuhr's attempt to explain the four Hebrew words of the poem consistently with his theory led him to make further far-fetched hypotheses about the construction of the basin. There are also chronological considerations that militate against Bargebuhr's theory, which, unfortunately, has become accepted doctrine among art historians.

11. The palace of the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtadir (d. 932) featured a tree with gold and silver branches, on which perched gold and silver birds; it also had figures of horses and riders (Rubiera, Arquitectura, p. 72).

The Andalusian caliph cAbd al-Rahm?n III had a lion fountain in his palace al-N?r?ya. In his palace-city Medin?t al-Zahr?5, there was a fountain with a lion, a gazelle, and a

crocodile; a fox, an eagle, and an elephant; a dove, a fakon, a peacock, and various other

birds, all pouring water, according to the report (Rubiera, Arquitectura, pp. 91-92). The palace of Mans?r b. ab? c?mir in late tenth-century Cordoba had a fountain with

spouts in the shape of birds (Rubiera, Arquitectura, p. 92). A poem by the Sicilian-Arab poet Ibn Hamdls (d. U32/33, but born toward the end of

Ibn Gabirol's lifetime, c. 1055) describes a palace in Bougie with lion fountains, gold trees, and birds in the trees, but it is unclear whether the birds are real or also of gold (Rubiera, Arquitectura, p. 94).

A wall-relief believed to be from the palace of al-Ma'mun (d. 1074/75) in Toledo depicts marble birds amid marble foliage; it may have Cordob?n prototypes; a picture is found in Dodds, Al-Andalus, p. 260.

12. Statues built to make sounds or interpreted so by literary texts include: a legendary

palace in ?an'?' described by Ibn al-Faqfli al-Hamadh?nl (tenth century) as having hollow

lion statues made to permit the wind to blow through mem and emerge from their mouths

with a roar (Rubiera, Arquitectura, p. 30); the palace of Mans?r b. ab? 'Amir mentioned in

note 11, above, which had a black lion fountain and turtle fountains, described by ab?

Marw?n al-Jaz?r? as "never ceasing to emit sounds" (Rubiera, p. 92); the lion fountain in the

palace in Bougie mentioned in note 11 above, described by Ibn Hamdls as "giving the murmur of water like roaring" (Rubiera, p. 94).

13. In Arabic philosophical terminology, the defining difference between man and the animals is that man is natiq, the word connoting both speaking and reasoning.

14. I have to admit that the passage is a difficult one with some textual uncertainties.

My interpretation depends on two emendations; for a discussion, see the notes to my translation in The Qasida (cited in n. 1). I have not yet found a way to account for the rrfrina

in v. 31.

15. There is now an extensive literature on poetic contests, including a collection of

essays on the phenomenon in Near Eastern literatures, G. J. Reinink and H. L. J.

Vanstiphout, eds., Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Medioeval Near East

(Leuven, 1991). The classic work is Moritz Steinschneider, Rangstreit-Literatur: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch historischen Klasse der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 155:1908, no. 4,1-87. An

excellent survey of the topic with full bibliography of secondary literature is found in



46 RAYMOND P. SCHEINDLIN

Alexander ben Yitshaq Pfaffenhofen, Sefer massah umerivah [The book of strife and quarrel

ing], ed. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 68-76 (thanks to Professor Menahem

Schmelzer for calling this work to my attention). A list of dispute works in Hebrew was

compiled by A. M. Haberman, "A List of Dispute Poems in Hebrew" [Hebrew] in Sefer hayovel likhvod Aleksander Marks [Alexander Marx Festschrift], ed. D. Frankel (New York, 1943), pp. 59-62. Studies relevant to this paper are: Ewald Wagner, Die arabische Rangstreit

dichtung und ihre Einordnung in die allgemeine Literaturgeschichte, Akademie der Wiss enschaften und der Literatur: Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen

Klasse, Jahrgang 1962, N. 8 (Wiesbaden, 1963), pp. 437-75; Geert Jan van Gelder, "The Conceit of Pen and Sword: On an Arabic Literary Debate," Journal of Semitic Studies 32 (1987): 329-60, partly criticizing Wagner's conclusions; Norman Roth, "Satire and Debate in

Two Famous Medieval Poems from al-Andalus: Love of Boys vs. Girls, the Pen and Other

Themes," Maghreb Review 4 (1979): 105-13; Wolfhardt Heinrichs, "Rose versus Narcissus:

Observations on an Arabic Literary Debate," in Reinink and Vanstiphout, Dispute Poems,

pp. 179-98. Also worthy of mention is an article by the late Professor Shalom Spiegel, "The

War of the Limbs" [Hebrew], which is being prepared for publication in a volume of

Spiegel's posthumous works by Professor Menahem Schmelzer; I wish to thank Professor

Schmelzer for calling my attention to this article and for providing me with a copy. 16. Not "crane and swallow" as in modern Hebrew usage. My translation follows Ibn

Jan?h, the lexicographer who was Ibn Gabirol's contemporary. 17. Ibn Gabir l, Shirei hahol, ed. Brody and Schirmann, p. 109 (poem 182, v. 7); ibid.,

p. 156, (poem 239, w. 4-6); ibid., p. 57 (poem 102, vv. 31-32).

Itzhaki, "In Praise of the Fruit," p. 309, n. 9, considers such debates exceedingly rare in

Hebrew secular literature; besides our poem, she mentions a single poem by Todros

Abulafia (no rnram riYUK noa in Schirmann, Hashirah ha'ivrit 2:421-23, a debate between four

flowers, which actually speak) and chap. 49 of al-Harizi's Tahkemoni, the subject of her

paper, in which only the poet speaks, comparing various flowers. See also her Ele ginat

Marugot, p. 72. For a literary debate between the five senses, see Uriel Simon, meni

D^vin "xsxh [Four approaches to the Book of Psalms] (Ramat Gan, 1982), p. 140, n. 54.

18. Wagner, Die arabische Rangstreitdichtung, p. 447, mentions also a lost work (it is

uncertain whether in poetry or prose) by a close contemporary of Ibn al-R?m?, dealing with

the same theme.

19. Both texts appear in ab?'1-Wal?d al-Himyar?, al-Badf flwasfal-rabf, ed. Henri P?r?s, 2d ed. (Morocco, 1989), pp. 46-54 (the first edition, of 1940, had different pagination). They are summarized and analyzed in detail by Heinrichs, "Rose versus Narcissus," pp. 186 ff.

20. Wagner, Die arabische Rangstreitdichtung, p. 455: flowers, plants, birds, and

minerals.

21. Heinrichs, "Rose versus Narcissus," p. 184; Wagner, Die arabische Rangstreitdichtung,

p. 444, . 9.

22. I thus have to disagree with Itzhaki's low estimation of this passage. She correctly identifies the quarrel's purpose as being to introduce the praise of the patron, but she fails to

see the intrinsic interest of the section itself. As a result, she is forced to consider it a kind of

expansion of the takhallus and not an integral part of the picture being transmitted ( ? rnonan nrann pj ̂ kudpk pbn in mm1?).

The editor of MS Schocken seems to have agreed with me that the patio passage is the

poem's chief delight, for he entitled the poem al-bust?n, "The Garden," not "The Palace" or

"The Dome"; the only part of the poem describing a garden is w. 18-32, for, as we have seen, the brief opening description of nature describes the countryside seen by the poet on

the way to the palace. 23. Josh. 10:12 and 13; the verb means "to halt" also in 1 Sam. 14:9.

24. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1913-38), vol. 4, pp. 128-29 and vol. 6, p. 281, n. 15 for rabbinic sources; I am grateful to Professor Tova Rosen for this

reference.




25. Quran, Sura 27; Jacob Lassner, Demonizing the Queen ofSheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam (Chicago and London, 1993); Joseph Horowitz, "Jewish Proper Names and Derivatives in the Quran," Hebrew Union College Annual 2 (1925): 168. For Solomonic kingship as a model for Islamic rule, especially in

panegyric poetry, see Speri, "Islamic Kingship," p. 24.

26. Rubiera, Arquitectura, pp. 45-54 for quotations from Arabic prose writers on the

subject. Examples in panegyric poetry: 1. Panegyric by al-Buhtur? (Iraq, d. 897) on the caliph Mutawakkil in Speri, Mannerism, pp. 196-98, containing an extended description of a pool in

the caliph's palace. The pool is said so to resemble the glass floor of Solomon's palace that it

would fool Bilqis, the queen of Sheba herself. As we shall presently see, this is an important part of the tradition of Solomon as miraculous builder. 2. Panegyric by Ibn Hamd?s (d. 1132; DTw?n, pp. 378ff.; Maqqai?, Nafh I, 491), describing a palace of al-Mu'tamid Ibn cAbb?d of Seville; the relevant part translated by Henri P?r?s, La po?sie andalouse en arabe classique au

Xle si?cle (Paris, 1953), p. 139.3. A passage by an Andalusian poet identified only as 'Abdalla in Ibn al-Katt?n? (d. 1030), Kitab al-tashb?h?t, ed. Ihs?n cAbb?s (Beirut, c. 1966), p. 69, describing palace rooms with floors that could fool Bilqis. 4. Another passage quoted by Ibn al-Katt?n?, p. 77, attributed to an Andalusian poet named al-Hasan b. Hassan. 5. Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadh?n?'s description of the palace in Sanc?5 mentioned in n. 12 above.

27. References to both Jewish and Islamic sources in Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba.

In the symposium at which an earlier version of this paper was first presented, I failed to give due importance to the references to Solomon, resisting Professor Nili Gold's

challenge to me to explain mem. I now humbly thank Professor Gold for her question, which has turned out to be so fertile.

28. Yehuda Liebes, "Sefer Yetsira in Ibn Gabir l and the Interpretation of His poem 'Ahavtikha'" [Hebrew] in Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6 (1987): 73-123; see pp. 97 and 104. Sara Katz, "Poetry and Mysticism in the Work of Solomon Ibn Gabir l," [Hebrew] in

Shira umistorin: Hyunim leyovlo shel hameshorer Sh. Shalom, ed. Y. Elstein and Ch. Shoham

(Ramat Gan, 1985), pp. 31-54. Both articles call attention to Ibn Gabirol's identification with

King Solomon.

29. See Prospero's speech in The Tempest 4.1.146 ff. For Ibn Sahula, see Meshal haqadmoni, ed. Yisrael Zemora (Tel Aviv, 1952), pp. 194-209; Schirrnann, Hashirah haHvrit, 2:387-400; my translation in David Stern and Mark Mirsky, Rabbinic Fantasies (Philadelphia, 1990),

pp. 295-311.

30. For examples from classical literature, see Horace's Odes 4:8 and 4:9. The theme is

also hinted at in 3:30. For a discussion of these poems and on the whole topic of the

panegyric poet's expression of independence, see R.O.A.M. Lyne, Horace: Behind the Public

Poetry (New Haven, 1995), pp. 77,126,158,164, and 208. For an example of the poet turning the tables on his patron in medieval Latin courtly poetry, see W. Th. Jackson, "The Politics of a Poet: The Archipoeta As Revealed by His Imagery," in his The Challenge of the Medieval Text: Studies in Genre and Interpretation, ed. Joan M. Ferrante and Robert W. Harming (New York,

1985), pp. 81-101. 31. The poem appears in his Shirei hahol, ed. Brody and Schirrnann, pp. 49-50 (poem 89,

v. 6). But the verse can be interpreted differently; see Jarden's edition, p. 215.

32. For a full discussion of this aspect of Ibn Gabirol's religious verse, see my article

"Contrasting Religious Experience in the Liturgical Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabir l and Judah Halevi," Prooftexts 13 (1993): 141-62.

33. Text, translation, and interpretation in my The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on

God, Israel, and the Soul (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 182-87.



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