Solomon ibn Gabirol

Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1021 to c. 1058) was a Hebrew poet and philosopher of Muslim Spain, born in Malaga and raised in Zaragoza. He wrote in Hebrew, and also in Arabic, and is counted among the foremost poets of the Spanish Hebrew tradition, both for his devotional verse and for shorter poems of grief, friendship and nature. His philosophical work, the Fountain of Life, was known to Latin scholars as the work of Avicebron.

The poems here come from two English translators. Emma Lazarus rendered ten of his shorter poems in Poems, vol. II (1889), among them Night-Piece, Hymn and A Degenerate Age. Israel Zangwill’s Selected Religious Poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol (1923) gives fifty devotional pieces, ending with the long cosmic hymn The Royal Crown (Keter Malkhut), which appears here as a single poem with its numbered cantos. No portrait of Gabirol survives.