[Yale-readings] Poet & Translator Peter Cole : Wednesday, Oct 22 @5PM

[Kuhl, Nancy]

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Bialik on the Slaughter: Then and Now
OCTOBER 22, 2025
5:00 PM
Comparative Literature Library
8th Floor Bingham Hall
300 College St.
Few poets in the history of modern Hebrew have possessed the power and prescience of Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934). "A modern Isaiah," in the words of Maxim Gorky, Bialik remains to this day an iconic and shockingly relevant poet, essayist, and tutelary spirit. On the Slaughter offers a panoramic view of Bialik's inner and outer landscapes-from his visionary "poems of wrath" that respond in startling fashion to the devastations of pogroms and revolutionary unrest to quietly sublime lyrics of longing and withering self-assessment. The conversation will range widely from matters literary to political, from Bialik's moment to our own.

Peter Cole, poet and translator, has been affiliated with Yale since 2006 and currently teaches classes each spring in the Comparative Literature Department and Judaic Studies. He is the author of six books of poems, and many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic. He also serves as co-editor of Princeton University Press's Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation. Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, 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 American Library Association's Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year, and a TLS Translation Prize. He is the recipient of a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 was named a MacArthur Fellow.  He is currently a co-editor of Princeton University Press's Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, and divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

Eliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the Departments of Religious Studies and History. Previously, he was Junior William Golding Fellow in the Humanities at Brasenose College and the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of the award-winning, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (Yale University Press in 2012). His second monograph Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) details the ideological background to Jews' involvement in Zionism, Capitalism, and Communism. His courses include The Global Right: From the French Revolution to the American Insurrection, Secularism: From the Enlightenment to the Present, Modern Jewish Intellectual History, The Holocaust in Culture and Politics. He has served as a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations and a consultant to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. Currently, he is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Center of Jewish History.

Jacqueline Vayntrub is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible. Dr. Vayntrub's areas of expertise include the Hebrew Bible, wisdom literature, biblical poetry and poetics, philology, and the history of biblical scholarship. She is especially interested in the Hebrew Bible's genres and modes of discourse against the broader background of ancient Near Eastern literary production, and its reception in and impact on Western scholarship. Broadly, her work seeks to recover the values of ancient literary culture through the language of the texts and examines how these values were reshaped in their reception. Dr. Vayntrub's first book, Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms (Routledge, 2019), examines the modern scholarly history of theorizing biblical poetry and draws out the unresolved tension between theories about the oral genesis of biblical poetry and evidence that points to the the genre's written origins. The book has been reviewed in Reading Religion and in panels at Yale, the British Association of Jewish Studies, and New York University and will be the subject of review panels at the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) 2019 annual meeting and at the University of Pennsylvania. Her second book, Reframing Biblical Poetry (under contract with Yale University Press) argues that a character's voice, deeds, and body shape the meaning of biblical texts. She has presented internationally, in keynote, and in named public lectures on her first and second book.

Robyn Creswell is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. He joined the Comparative Literature Department at Yale in 2014, after teaching two years at Brown University. He has taught courses on Arabic literature, the practice of literary translation, the literature of sports, and The Thousand and One Nights. He is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (PUP, 2019), a study of the modernist poetry movement in Arabic and its Cold War context, which received the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize. In 2012, he was a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, where he worked on a translation of the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim's early masterpiece, That Smell and Notes from Prison(New Directions, 2013). He has also translated the Moroccan critic and fabulist Abdelfattah Kilito's The Clash of Images (New Directions, 2010) and The Tongue of Adam (New Directions, 2015), both from the French. His translation of Iman Mersal's The Threshold ( (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) won the National Translation Award in Poetry. In addition to his scholarship, he regularly publishes works of criticism in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been a fellow at the NYPL's Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. He was poetry editor of The Paris Review from 2011-2018 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. His current project, The Ruins: Arabic Poetry in an Age of Extremes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming), is an intellectual history of the Arab world after WWII, told through the lives and works of its representative poets.
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