Solomon ibn Gabirol – författare

Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021–1058) of Spain was a Jewish philosopher and moralist who is perhaps best known for the beautiful forty-stanza poem Keter Malkhut (The Kingly Crown). Hailed by scholars as one of the most important classics of Hebrew literature, The Kingly Crown employs the metaphor of a king in his palace to describe the relationship between humanity and God. This medieval poem is full of vivid imagery and scriptural references. Within its many layers of meaning, readers will find not only an extended prayer and meditation, but also signs of the neoplatonic philosophy that formed the foundation of Gabirol's cosmology and theology.The University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to bring back in print Bernard Lewis's lyrical translation of The Kingly Crown. This new edition includes Lewis's extensive notes and introduction as well as a new introduction, notes, and detailed philosophical commentary by Andrew L. Gluck. Gluck's meticulous correction of errors in the Hebrew text make this the most accurate version ever published with an English translation. Facing page Hebrew verse and English translation, as well as a new bibliographical section about the poet and poem, add to the utility and value of this wonderful book.General readers will delight in The Kingly Crown's lucid text and scholars will discover a wealth of previously unavailable notes and historical information.

Poet, philosopher, and sensitive misanthrope, a spectacular fly in the ointment of the refined eleventh-century Andalusian-Jewish elite, Solomon Ibn Gabirol comes down to us as one of the most complicated intellectual figures in the history of post-biblical Judaism. Unlike his worldly predecessor Shmuel HaNagid, the first important poet of the period, Ibn Gabirol was a reclusive, mystically inclined figure whose modern-sounding medieval poems range from sublime descriptions of the heavenly spheres to poisonous jabs at court life and its pretenders. His verse, which demonstrates complete mastery of the classicizing avant-garde poetics of the day, grafted an Arabic aesthetic onto a biblical vocabulary and Jewish setting, taking Hebrew poetry to a level of metaphysical sophistication and devotional power it has not achieved since. Peter Cole's selection includes poems from nearly all of Ibn Gabirol's secular and liturgical lyric genres, as well as a complete translation of the poet's long masterwork, "Kingdom's Crown." Cole's rich, inventive introduction places the poetry in historical context and charts its influence through the centuries. Extensive annotations accompany the poems.This companion volume to Peter Cole's critically acclaimed Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid presents the first comprehensive selection of Ibn Gabirol's verse to be published in English and brings to life an astonishing body of poetry by one of the greatest Jewish writers of all time.

This volume is a sound translation of the Fons vitae of Solomon ibn Gabirol (born 1021/1022), who was the first Jewish philosopher in Spain. In the Fons vitae, Gabirol argues that there is a sensible and an intelligible world; that everything in the sensible and intelligible world is composed of matter and form; that lower things are an example of higher ones by which they are caused; that the intelligible world is composed of universal intelligence, universal soul, nature, and universal spiritual matter; that the human soul possessed knowledge when it was made but lost it when it was joined to the body and must remember it through sense-experience; that it is good for the soul to turn away from sensible things and pour itself into intelligible ones so that it may realize its final cause of returning to the higher, intellectual world; and that the ultimate source of all being—the font of life—is something both one and good, something from which all being flows like water emanates from a spring or like light flows from the sun. These doctrines profoundly influenced medieval Christian thinkers. While Dominicus Gundissalinus (c. 1110 – after 1190), William of Auvergne (c. 1190 – 1249), and Thomas of York (c. 1220 – 1260) embraced key elements of Gabirol’s system, Albert the Great (c. 1200 – 1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) sharply criticized Gabirol’s thought. Because of the Fons vitae, Gabirol is today widely recognized as one of the greatest Jewish Neoplatonists.