Translated by Peter Cole

Peter Cole is the recipient of a 2004 PEN Translation Fund Award for The Dream of the Poem: The Hebrew Poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain (to be published by Princeton University Press).


Let man remember throughout his life
             he’s on his way toward death:
each day he travels only a little
             so he thinks he’s always at rest—

like someone sitting at ease on a ship
while the wind sweeps it over the depths