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“Oh Mohammed, Are You Still Awake?”: Admiel Kosman, Martin Buber, and the Poetics of Engagement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2019

Maeera Y. Shreiber
Maeera Y. Shreiber*
Affiliation:
University of Utah
*
m.shreiber@utah.edu
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Abstract

An award-winning poet, an accomplished Talmudist, and a frequent contributor to the pages of Haaretz, Admiel Kosman is hardly new to the scene of contemporary Hebrew letters. However, his work only recently became accessible to English readers when the first translated volume of his poetry appeared in 2011. Reading his work within the context of Martin Buber, whom Kosman regards as his “rebbe,” one discovers a profound challenge to principles of relation—political as well as personal—that are grounded in fixed categories of identity and belonging. Drawing upon the Song of Songs, which whispers throughout his work, Kosman offers us a strong counterresponse to the dominant model of the lyric monologue, with a poetics that aspires towards the dialogic.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , April 2019 , pp. 169 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

This essay is dedicated to Alan Mintz z”l, who encouraged me to work on Hebrew poetry. I also wish to thank Ariel Zindler for his help; AJS Review’s anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions; and Admiel Kosman himself, who generously shared his essays, poems, drafts, and ideas.

References

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24. Rabbi Akiva's ruling is recorded in numerous commentaries on the biblical poem, including the introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Song of Songs, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 1–2; and by Francis Landy in the introduction to his important study, Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983), 13–18.

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38. See both Scripture and Translation: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) and Kepnes, Steven, The Text as Thou: Martin Buber's Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)Google Scholar for fuller accounts of Buber's theory of translation.

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41. Freimann and Kosman, “Shaky Identities.”

42. Kosman expands on this point in his 2002 review of Levinas's Nine Talmudic Lectures: “Forget the Jews, but Judaism Is Wonderful,” https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/1.5213859.

43. Buber and Kaufman, I and Thou, 42.

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