Warsztat poetycki Yehudy ha-Lewiego: próba charakterystyki w odniesieniu do tradycji literackich starożytnego świata greckiego
Yehuda ha-Levi’s Poetry Workshop: An Attempt at Characterization in Relation to the Literary Traditions of the Ancient Greek World

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the poetics of Yehuda ha-Levi against the background of literary traditions of ancient Greek and Latin poetry and rhetoric. Ha-Levi’s poetic style can be characterized by his extreme sensibility to the sound of language and his mastering of classical Arabic prosody and poetics. The article describes and exemplifies various means of poetic expression (in terms of phonetics and syntax) in ha-Levi’s poetry, setting each phenomenon (if possible) in the context of similar poetic and rhetoric ornaments used by ancient Greek and Roman authors, as well as the theoretical reflection on their use provided by Greek and Latin handbooks on rhetoric and verbal expression. The first part deals with phonetic tropes and ornaments: ṣimud, repetition, internal rhyme and onomatopoeia. The second part is dedicated to the syntactic tropes: parallelism, completion (hašlama), as well as two distinct ways of creating linguistic abundance (odep̄ and giḇuḇ), and rhetorical question. While direct dependence of the style and language of ha-Levi on Greek and Latin literary tradition has not been proved, it is known that in the middle ages Arabic poetics were exposed to, and partially shaped by the influence of ancient Greek works on literary theory (e.g. Aristotle’s Rhetoric). The current study makes an attempt at defining ha-Levi’s poetical style while noting both the more universal characteristics of poetic language and the peculiarities and individual preferences of the medieval Jewish poet.

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