Jaroslav Stetkevych
Professor Emeritus of Arabic Literature, The University of Chicago
Research Associate, Dept. of Arabic & Islamic Studies, Georgetown University
Jaroslav Stetkevych was born in Burkaniv, Ukraine on 25 April, 1929. He began his secondary school studies at the Statsgymnasium in Göttingen and completed secondary school at the Ukrainian Gymnasium at Berchtesgaden, Germany in 1947 and the German Gymnasium in Munich, 1949. He began his university studies at the University of Madrid where he received the Licenciatura in Semitic Philology with Premio Extraordinario honors in 1959. During that time (1957-58) he studied in the PhD program at Cairo University. In 1959 he received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to pursue PhD studies in the department of Semitic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. There he studied Arabic Literature under Sir Hamilton Gibb and received his PhD in 1962. He taught Modern and Classical Arabic literature and Classical Arabic syntax in the NELC department at the University of Chicago from 1962-96. He is currently a Research Associate at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych.
Stetkevych’s research interests and publications span both Classical and Modern Arabic Language and Literature, with his deepest involvement in Arabic poetry. His work on Arabic linguistics and philology grows from his 1970 book The Modern Arabic Literary Language to include studies ranging from contemporary Arabic language on stage to the hermeneutics of Classical Qur’ānic exegetical terminology and the poetics and semiotics of animal nomenclature in the classical qaṣīdah. In the field of Arabic poetry, his major contribution is to the study of the lyricism and aesthetics of the Classical Arabic poetic tradition is the 1993 book, The Zephyrs of Najd: the Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb. In his 1996 book, Muḥammad and the Golden Bough, he integrates the study of Arabian and Islamic myth into the broader fields of comparative mythology and religion. His articles over the years have explored various facets of Classical and Modern Arabic poetry and poetics. His 2015 book, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry, gathers and refines twenty years of work on Arabic hunt poetry to demonstrate the continuities and discontinuities of the hunt theme from the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah through Modernist free-verse poetry. His current project is on the ʿAyniyyah of Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī: Elegy and the Achievement of Allegory in Classical Arabic Poetry.
Address: Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Research Associate, Dept. of Arabic & Islamic Studies, Georgetown University
Jaroslav Stetkevych was born in Burkaniv, Ukraine on 25 April, 1929. He began his secondary school studies at the Statsgymnasium in Göttingen and completed secondary school at the Ukrainian Gymnasium at Berchtesgaden, Germany in 1947 and the German Gymnasium in Munich, 1949. He began his university studies at the University of Madrid where he received the Licenciatura in Semitic Philology with Premio Extraordinario honors in 1959. During that time (1957-58) he studied in the PhD program at Cairo University. In 1959 he received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to pursue PhD studies in the department of Semitic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. There he studied Arabic Literature under Sir Hamilton Gibb and received his PhD in 1962. He taught Modern and Classical Arabic literature and Classical Arabic syntax in the NELC department at the University of Chicago from 1962-96. He is currently a Research Associate at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych.
Stetkevych’s research interests and publications span both Classical and Modern Arabic Language and Literature, with his deepest involvement in Arabic poetry. His work on Arabic linguistics and philology grows from his 1970 book The Modern Arabic Literary Language to include studies ranging from contemporary Arabic language on stage to the hermeneutics of Classical Qur’ānic exegetical terminology and the poetics and semiotics of animal nomenclature in the classical qaṣīdah. In the field of Arabic poetry, his major contribution is to the study of the lyricism and aesthetics of the Classical Arabic poetic tradition is the 1993 book, The Zephyrs of Najd: the Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb. In his 1996 book, Muḥammad and the Golden Bough, he integrates the study of Arabian and Islamic myth into the broader fields of comparative mythology and religion. His articles over the years have explored various facets of Classical and Modern Arabic poetry and poetics. His 2015 book, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry, gathers and refines twenty years of work on Arabic hunt poetry to demonstrate the continuities and discontinuities of the hunt theme from the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah through Modernist free-verse poetry. His current project is on the ʿAyniyyah of Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī: Elegy and the Achievement of Allegory in Classical Arabic Poetry.
Address: Washington, District of Columbia, United States
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Books by Jaroslav Stetkevych
In this volume a respected and masterful scholar of the Arabic language Jaroslav Stetkevych notes the ways that new words have been incorporated into the language, ranging from deriving new terms from existing roots (for example, the word for "newspaper" derives from the word meaning "sheet to write on") to downright assimilation of foreign words. Also noting the changes in grammar and semantics, Stetkevych illustrates how literary Arabic has become a more flexible language. Originally published in 1970, this volume is a clear assessment of lexical and stylistic developments in Modern Literary Arabic.
This classic book is an important resource for scholars and advanced students of Arabic language and linguistics who wish to study the complexities of language change and lexical expansion.
Chapter 5, part 2, “Spaces of Delight: Perceived, Lost, Remembered” (pp. 180-201, 291-97), trans. into Arabic by Prof. Muḥammad Birayrī, Cairo: Fuṣūl, 1995.
Full Arabic translation: Prof. Ḥasan al-Bannā ʿIzz al-Dīn, trans., intro. & notes. Ṣabā Najd: Shiʿriyyat al-Ḥanīn fī al-Nasīb al-ʿArabī al-Kilāsīkī .Riyāḍ: Markaz al-Malik Fayṣal li al-Buḥūth wa al-Dirāsāt al-Islāmiyyah, 1425/2004.
Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, Jaroslav Stetkevych attempts in this book to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre.
Stetkevych concentrates on the "places of lost bliss" that furnish the dominant motif in the lyric-elegiac opening section (nasib) of the classic Arab code, or qusidah. In defining the Arabic lyrical genre, he shows how pre-Islamic lamentations over abandoned campsites evolved, in Arabo-Islamic mystical poetry, into expressions of spiritual nostalgia. Stetkevych also draws intriguing parallels between the highlands of Najd in Arabic poetry and Arcadia in the European tradition. He concludes by exploring the degree to which the pastoral-paradisiacal archetype of the nasib pervades Arabic literary perception, from the pre-Islamic ode through the Thousand and One Nights and later texts.
Enhanced by Stetkevych's sensitive translations of all the Arabic texts discussed, The Zephyrs of Najd brings the classical Arabic ode fully into the purview of contemporary literary and critical discourse.
Now in Paperback!
Connects pre-Islamic Arabian myth to world mythic traditions.
"Stetkevych succeeds brilliantly in reconstructing the myth of the destruction of the Thamud, an ancient people of north Arabia. . . . This book will add a new dimension to the study of Near Eastern and Mediterranean myth and legend." —Choice
"Stetkevych’s critical and wide-ranging perspective reveals a wealth of insights. This book is must reading for everyone in the field of religion and one of the most important works in recent years." —Religious Studies Review
"The graceful writing, interdisciplinary scope, and hermeneutical depth should make it compelling reading for those interested in the mythos of Arabia before and at the birth of Islam and in comparable myths in neighboring civilizations." —MESA Bulletin
"It opens up new dimensions of how to think about, how to study, how to see interrelationships in the ancient Arabian world and their connections with the Mediterranean world in general. . . . a stunning piece of work." —Chronicle of Higher Education
Through its development of a methodology for analyzing the mythic and folkloric traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia and the process of their incorporation into Islamic myth and Qur’anic texts, Muhammad and the Golden Bough offers compelling insights for students of Islam, comparative religion, and cultural anthropology. By linking Arabic myth with a broad range of ancient and classical texts—including Gilgamesh, Homer, and the Hebrew Bible—the book makes a provocative contribution to biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, classics, and comparative literature.
In the chapters of Part I of The Hunt in Arabic Poetry, Stetkevych explores the divergent themes of the heroic and the anti-heroic hunter within the grand genre of archaic Arabic odes and its transformation with the transition to Islam to a poetics of sacrifice and redemption. Part II traces the emergent aesthetics of the free-standing hunt lyric within the courtly culture of the Umayyad and ‘Abbāsid caliphates and the transition from description to imagism, concluding with the appearance of the long narrative hunt poem. Part III moves to the high Modernism of twentieth-century Arab free-verse poets and with it the reemergence of the classical theme of the hunt, now as a metaphor for the Modernist poet’s metapoetic pursuit of the poem itself.
“Jaroslav Stetkevych’s The Hunt in Arabic Poetry is an astounding achievement. Not only does he map the genealogy of the hunt as a poetic preoccupation with a number of thematic and semiotic markers and mechanisms; he also draws a history of cultural complexity through significant temporal signposts that happen to reflect on Arab political and social life. In the end, reading his book is no less than studying Arab cultural history through one significant poetic endeavor that distinguishes it among other cultures.” — Muhsin al-Musawi, Columbia University
Papers by Jaroslav Stetkevych
In this volume a respected and masterful scholar of the Arabic language Jaroslav Stetkevych notes the ways that new words have been incorporated into the language, ranging from deriving new terms from existing roots (for example, the word for "newspaper" derives from the word meaning "sheet to write on") to downright assimilation of foreign words. Also noting the changes in grammar and semantics, Stetkevych illustrates how literary Arabic has become a more flexible language. Originally published in 1970, this volume is a clear assessment of lexical and stylistic developments in Modern Literary Arabic.
This classic book is an important resource for scholars and advanced students of Arabic language and linguistics who wish to study the complexities of language change and lexical expansion.
Chapter 5, part 2, “Spaces of Delight: Perceived, Lost, Remembered” (pp. 180-201, 291-97), trans. into Arabic by Prof. Muḥammad Birayrī, Cairo: Fuṣūl, 1995.
Full Arabic translation: Prof. Ḥasan al-Bannā ʿIzz al-Dīn, trans., intro. & notes. Ṣabā Najd: Shiʿriyyat al-Ḥanīn fī al-Nasīb al-ʿArabī al-Kilāsīkī .Riyāḍ: Markaz al-Malik Fayṣal li al-Buḥūth wa al-Dirāsāt al-Islāmiyyah, 1425/2004.
Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, Jaroslav Stetkevych attempts in this book to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre.
Stetkevych concentrates on the "places of lost bliss" that furnish the dominant motif in the lyric-elegiac opening section (nasib) of the classic Arab code, or qusidah. In defining the Arabic lyrical genre, he shows how pre-Islamic lamentations over abandoned campsites evolved, in Arabo-Islamic mystical poetry, into expressions of spiritual nostalgia. Stetkevych also draws intriguing parallels between the highlands of Najd in Arabic poetry and Arcadia in the European tradition. He concludes by exploring the degree to which the pastoral-paradisiacal archetype of the nasib pervades Arabic literary perception, from the pre-Islamic ode through the Thousand and One Nights and later texts.
Enhanced by Stetkevych's sensitive translations of all the Arabic texts discussed, The Zephyrs of Najd brings the classical Arabic ode fully into the purview of contemporary literary and critical discourse.
Now in Paperback!
Connects pre-Islamic Arabian myth to world mythic traditions.
"Stetkevych succeeds brilliantly in reconstructing the myth of the destruction of the Thamud, an ancient people of north Arabia. . . . This book will add a new dimension to the study of Near Eastern and Mediterranean myth and legend." —Choice
"Stetkevych’s critical and wide-ranging perspective reveals a wealth of insights. This book is must reading for everyone in the field of religion and one of the most important works in recent years." —Religious Studies Review
"The graceful writing, interdisciplinary scope, and hermeneutical depth should make it compelling reading for those interested in the mythos of Arabia before and at the birth of Islam and in comparable myths in neighboring civilizations." —MESA Bulletin
"It opens up new dimensions of how to think about, how to study, how to see interrelationships in the ancient Arabian world and their connections with the Mediterranean world in general. . . . a stunning piece of work." —Chronicle of Higher Education
Through its development of a methodology for analyzing the mythic and folkloric traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia and the process of their incorporation into Islamic myth and Qur’anic texts, Muhammad and the Golden Bough offers compelling insights for students of Islam, comparative religion, and cultural anthropology. By linking Arabic myth with a broad range of ancient and classical texts—including Gilgamesh, Homer, and the Hebrew Bible—the book makes a provocative contribution to biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, classics, and comparative literature.
In the chapters of Part I of The Hunt in Arabic Poetry, Stetkevych explores the divergent themes of the heroic and the anti-heroic hunter within the grand genre of archaic Arabic odes and its transformation with the transition to Islam to a poetics of sacrifice and redemption. Part II traces the emergent aesthetics of the free-standing hunt lyric within the courtly culture of the Umayyad and ‘Abbāsid caliphates and the transition from description to imagism, concluding with the appearance of the long narrative hunt poem. Part III moves to the high Modernism of twentieth-century Arab free-verse poets and with it the reemergence of the classical theme of the hunt, now as a metaphor for the Modernist poet’s metapoetic pursuit of the poem itself.
“Jaroslav Stetkevych’s The Hunt in Arabic Poetry is an astounding achievement. Not only does he map the genealogy of the hunt as a poetic preoccupation with a number of thematic and semiotic markers and mechanisms; he also draws a history of cultural complexity through significant temporal signposts that happen to reflect on Arab political and social life. In the end, reading his book is no less than studying Arab cultural history through one significant poetic endeavor that distinguishes it among other cultures.” — Muhsin al-Musawi, Columbia University