Coleridge in the Pleasure Dome of Hebrew

Abstract

ABSTRACT Samuel Taylor Coleridge maintained a deep relationship with Hebrew. In this article, I examine the Hebrew infrastructure of his poem “Kubla Khan” (1816) and the translations of this poem into Hebrew in light of Coleridge’s translations from Hebrew. These will serve as keys for a threefold argument. My first goal is to obtain new insights into Coleridge’s poetry and thought through the prisms of Hebrew and translation, especially through the intersection of Kubla’s “pleasure-dome” with the biblical “House of the Forest of Lebanon” and Coleridge’s Hebrew-English mini-lexicon. The second goal is to map the mutual shaping power of English Romanticism and Hebrew Enlightenment through the possibility that Coleridge was influenced by the European Hebrew scholar-poet Solomon Löwisohn (1780–1821). The third goal is to investigate the translations of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” into Hebrew in view of his choices in translating from Hebrew, his insights on Biblical poetry and the Hebrew language. These three threads, linking the study of language, poetry, translation, and history, open new paths to understanding Coleridge’s work, offer a complex perspective on the relations between European Romanticism and Hebrew Enlightenment, and hint at new possibilities for the prismatic translation of Coleridge’s poetry into Hebrew.