PETER COLE
Translation
On the Slaughter
Hayim Nahman Bialik
New York Review Books, October 2025
Few poets in the history of Hebrew have possessed the power and prescience of Hayim Nahman Bialik. Born in 1873 in a small Ukrainian village, he spent his most productive years in Odessa and in his fifties made his way to British Mandatory Palestine. He died in Vienna in 1934.
Bialik’s body of work opened a path from the traditional Jewish world of Eastern Europe into a more expansive Jewish humanism. In a line that stretches back to the Bible and the Hebrew poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain, he stands out—wrote Maxim Gorky—as a modern Isaiah. To this day he remains an iconic and shockingly relevant poet, essayist, and tutelary spirit.
Translated and introduced by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole, On the Slaughter presents Bialik for the first time in English as a masterful artist, someone far more politically and psychologically unsettling than his reputation as the national poet of the Jewish people might suggest. This compact collection offers readers a panoramic view of Bialik’s inner and outer landscapes: his visionary “poems of wrath” respond in startling fashion to the devastations of pogroms and a Jewish community in crisis, while his quietly sublime lyrics of longing, doubt, and withering self-assessment bring us into the silence at the heart of his art. The volume also includes a sampling of slyly sophisticated verse for children, and a moving introduction that bridges Bialik’s moment and our own.
“Bialik’s poetry flies up as ‘a hidden spark in the stone of my heart,’ and Peter Cole’s translations glow with that Kabbalistic spark. Here is the father of modern Hebrew poetry in electrifying modern English. Bialik died in 1934, but he seems an inescapable poet of our day.”
— Rosanna Warren
“No voice comes closer than Haim Nahman Bialik’s to capturing the agonizing interplay between Jewish hunger for redemption and the inadequacy of its devotees. Peter Cole—a major poet himself—has mastered the consummate master of contemporary Hebrew letters, rendering him into English with unrivaled clarity, erudition, and multilingual precision. Here is Bialik taking his rightful place in the larger poetic world.”
— Steven J. Zipperstein, author of
Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History
“Look closely: and Bialik’s angry, explicit, uncontainable but also transcendent witness to genocide will blast away the cynical and selective attempts of nationalists and authoritarians to appropriate his work. Peter Cole is one of our greatest living poet-translators. With his note-perfect ear and an intensity rooted in scholarship one finds a music entirely equal to the task.” — Vivek Narayanan, Author of After
Requiem and Other Poems
Aharon Shabtai
New Directions, 2025
Part kaddish, part lament, and a powerful call for stocktaking and peace, Requiem cries out for an end to carnage and slaughter: “The horror / the calamity / the disgrace, / the rubble of folly / and religion’s stupidities, / the dimness of vision / and violence of despair / won’t be repaired by an officer, / a bomb or a plane, / and not by still more blood. / Only wisdom of the heart could mend it… / only the gardeners of peace.”Long one of the most outspoken Israeli critics of his government’s treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as “the most important Hebrew poet of his generation” (The Boston Globe).
“Aharon Shabtai is the poet-conscience of Israel and one of the world’s great writers—a fact forever established by Peter Cole’s first-love-in-a-second-skin translations. Here is Shabtai’s shalom-song, his goodbye, good night, and good luck to all that, a requiem personal and political and tragically inextricable, ripped from the headlines as much as ripped from the heart.”
— Joshua Cohen
“Aharon Shabtai’s elegaic poems are all heart in Peter Cole’s magnificent translation. This is a poetry of the fragility of old age; a poetry of sorrow for a country whose peace he won’t live to see; a poetry that serves Memory, the mother of the Muses. As a renowned translator of ancient Greek poetry into modern Hebrew, Shabtai has the epigrammatic touch, that way of chiseling lines so that the words ring in the memory. His long ‘Requiem,’ which specifies the dead by their names and an illuminating anecdotal detail, should remind us all that the smallest particulars of a man or woman’s life are worth more in God’s ledger than any windy abstraction uttered by pundits, celebrities, activists, and politicians: ‘Before I fall asleep /// Grandpa Beier / undresses // and leaves / on the floor // a large, / clumsy hernia belt // like / a horse’s harness.”
— Ange Mlinko
The Dream of the Poem:
Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492
Princeton University Press, 2007
2010 TLS Translation Prize
2007 R. R. Hawkins Award, Association of American Publishers Book of the Year
2007 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry
“A brilliant and original body of Hebrew verse…. In Peter Cole’s rich new anthology, the extent of [this] astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English…. His versions are masterly.”
— Eric Ormsby, The New York Times Book Review
“Peter Cole’s work is an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us. His work represents the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen for many years…. The Dream of the Poem is a crowning achievement.”
— Richard Howard
The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition
Translated and Annotated by Peter Cole
Yale University Press, April 2012
Co-edited and with an afterword by Aminadav Dykman
John Frederick Nims Prize from Poetry magazine
Honorable Mention from: 2012 New York Book Festival (Poetry)
2012 New England Book Festival (Poetry)
2012 Association of American Publishers PROSE Awards (Literature)
2013 Lois Roth Award (MLA, Translation)
“Peter Cole brings his unparalleled, remarkable gifts as a translator and scholar of Hebrew poetry to the world of Jewish mystical literature. In this groundbreaking, panoramic view of Jewish mystical poetics, Cole offers fresh, often stunning translations that will delight both scholars and general readers alike. Studded with insight, and written with great verve, this book will become a classic.”
— Lawrence Fine, Mt. Holyoke College
“Resplendent … a dazzling treasury of verse spanning more than 1,500 years and accompanied by fascinating, illuminating commentary rich in history, biography, and literary expertise…. Cole has brilliantly preserved [the poems’] “diverse prosodies” and ecstatic lyricism in his supple translations, allowing readers to fully appreciate how they grapple with ‘timeless concerns’.”
— Booklist
J’accuse
Aharon Shabtai
New Directions, 2003
2004 PEN Translation Prize for Poetry
“In his fusions of the sensual and the spiritual, the ordinary and the exalted, the sexual in the suffering psyche and the intelligent consciousness searching and spinning through history, myth and layers of language, Shabtai is one of the most exciting poets writing anywhere, and certainly the most audacious. The poems have a wonderful almost vertiginous energy, an enormous erudition, and a startling, finally inspiring candor. Brilliantly translated by Peter Cole.”
— C.K. Williams
So What: New & Selected Poems,
1971-2005
Taha Muhammad Ali
Copper Canyon Press, 2006
Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin
“Some of the finest translations of modern Arabic verse that I have ever read.”
— Robyn Creswell, The National
“A wise, smart, canny, superbly gifted and totally original poet.”
— Gerald Stern
War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems
Aharon Shabtai
New Directions, 2010
“Cole does a remarkable job bringing lightness and immediacy to Shabtai’s quotidian observations and depth to his spiritual delvings, making [War & Love, Love & War] an excellent introduction to a vast and varied oeuvre.”
— Publishers Weekly
Hebrew Writers on Writing
Edited by Peter Cole
Trinity University Press, 2008
“Exciting…. An invaluable anthology, by turn delightful, surprising and thought-provoking…. Cole’s contribution is three–fold: first in his selections, second in his deft translations… and lastly in the biographical and critical headnotes, each a marvel of compression and insight.”
— The Jerusalem Report
Moods
Yoel Hoffmann
New Directions (June 2015)
Best Translated Book of the Year, Fiction Finalist 2016 (Three Percent)
“It’s a miracle of Peter Cole’s sinuous, sensitive English translation of Moods that Hoffmann seems even more ‘himself’: a magus, a sphinx, the Kohen of the koan, the Grand Rabbi of Kyoto—a genius.”
— Joshua Cohen
“Moods should be named the best fiction, best poetry, best machine, and best spiritual possession of the year…. Peter Cole’s translation is exquisite.” —Kate Garber, Judge, Best Translated Book of the Year Award, Bookseller 192 Books
“Beautifully composed … luminously translated.” —Three Percent
“Part novel and part memoir, … translated into beautiful, powerful prose by Peter Cole.”
—Vanity Fair
“Its gentle humour, searing pain and unmistakable humanity ennoble the literature of life and the life in literature. Here, memory is fecund, messy, fictive and, finally, radiantly authentic. Translated with grace and humour.”
—Review 31 (UK)
“Perhaps Hoffmann’s most Hoffmann-esque book yet…. Its prose, translated … by the American poet Peter Cole, is sensuous and fresh. One sits comfortably in it, as in summer morning air. The world opens in scenes both gestural and exact, bursting at times into magical-realistic bloom…. Moments expand and dissolve, crystallize and turn, revealing particularities even as they melt into mood….[Hoffmann] writes prayerfully … as though he were giving thanks not just for the moment as he experienced it first, but also for the words he finds now to express it and for the act of expression itself. His reminder of what is occurring meanwhile is an attempt to honor those things as well…. Hoffmann’s subject is the miracle of this most ordinary thing, and his prose is its revelation and praise.”
— Jenny Hendrix, The Forward