MacArthur "Genius" Peter Cole spoke on "Translating the Middle East: Where Art and Ethics Meet" March 23 in Russell House. Cole, who lives in Jerusalem and co-edits Ibis Editions, has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan and Middlebury College.
Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Association of American Publishers' Hawkins Award for Book of the Year, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the MLA Scaglione Translation Award, and a TLS Translation Prize. In 2007, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. In center, Jeremy Zwelling, director of Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate Program, associate professor of religion and his wife, Vicky Zwelling, associate director of the Career Resource Center, enjoy Cole's talk, which was sponsored by the Committee for Middle Eastern Studies at Wesleyan and the Mellon Foundation. Cole is the author of three books of poems, most recently 'Things on Which I've Stumbled' (New Directions, 2008). His many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include 'The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492' (Princeton), 'Aharon Shabtai's J'accuse' (New Directions), 'Taha Muhammad Ali's So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005' (Copper Canyon), and 'Hebrew Writers on Writing' (Trinity). (Photos by Stefan Weinberger '10)
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