_Ghazal_ is the Arabic word for "amatory verse," and in other languages of the Islamic world it d... more _Ghazal_ is the Arabic word for "amatory verse," and in other languages of the Islamic world it designates a sonnet-like poetic form. The notion that the word stems from Arabic _ghazl_ "spinning thread" is widely held, despite the absence of support for this in classical lexicography and poetry criticism. Comparison to Semitic cognates points to an alternative derivation of ghazal from a verb of speaking—specifically, speech that is ambiguous and suggestive—by way of attraction to the gazelle (Arabic _ghazāl_), an ancient Near Eastern idiom for the beloved. While ghazal poetry emerged in Western Arabia during the first century of Islam, the genesis of ghazal as a term of art predates the literary record, as may be appreciated in a poem by ‘Amr ibn Qamī’a (6th century CE) that has been called the earliest complete qaṣīda in Arabic manuscript tradition.
Disputation Literature in the Near East and Beyond, 2020
Literary disputation is one of the oldest genres of world literature, with fictive speech-contest... more Literary disputation is one of the oldest genres of world literature, with fictive speech-contests between allegorical and personified beings going back to Sumerian times. It was especially fruitful in Islamic literature, where some ancient themes were perpetuated and new ones were instituted. One apparent novelty of the Islamic period was debate between Night and Day. It appears in Arabic prose of the 4th/10th century, Persian poetry of the 5th/11th, and eventually in Hebrew and Turkish, remaining a productive form up through the modern Nahḍa period. This article is a descriptive catalogue of arguments between Night and Day.
Approaches to the Study of Pre-modern Arabic Anthologies , 2021
My 2018 article "Meaning and Captivity in Classical Arabic Philology" (below) is one long exegesi... more My 2018 article "Meaning and Captivity in Classical Arabic Philology" (below) is one long exegesis of an anonymous pair of verses given out as the locus classicus for _maʿnā_, the Arabic word for "meaning." It took ten years to write, and in the tenth I found a source-text for the verses—a book now missing, but quoted in other books that are still around. It is the _Kitāb Abyāt al-ma‘ānī_ of Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī (d. 231/846), belonging to the genre of _kutub al-ma‘ānī_: anthologies of Arabic verses selected for their ambiguity, opacity, and the difficulty of grasping their meanings. | | | | | | | Needless to say, after working on these verses for so long, with a seriousness ordinarily reserved for fragments of Parmenides, I was much affected by the discovery that that they came from something like a book of riddles. What to do? My answer was to "double down" and begin collecting as many other fragments from _Kitāb Abyāt al-ma‘ānī_ as I could find. The resulting article presents what came of the effort. It is a work of philology, literary history, and homage to an unfamous scholar of the ninth century, and the capstone to "Meaning and Captivity," my first work of literary theory.
This article takes a close look at the word _maʿnā_ as analyzed by Abbasid-era authorities on the... more This article takes a close look at the word _maʿnā_ as analyzed by Abbasid-era authorities on the Arabic language, chiefly Ibn Fāris (d. 395 A.H./1004 CE). The word’s context-sensitivity and polysemy are well known; less well appreciated are the lexical and morphological preconditions for _maʿnā_’s diversity of meanings across the disciplines. Even less well studied (though widely quoted in lexicographical literature) is the anonymous basīṭ-meter couplet that Ibn Fāris cites in _al-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-lugha_ as a locus probans for the word. The speaker in these verses boasts of ransoming a bound captive (_ʿānī_), using _maʿnā_ to refer to the captive’s abject state.
There is evidence to suggest that the verses once featured in a lost work of the philologist Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī (d. 231/846) called _Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī_. This was an anthology of verses framed like riddles whose interpretations hinge on double meanings and rare metaphors, and its form and content may be judged by numerous outtakes preserved in later anthologies and lexica. The affiliation of Ibn Fāris’s verses to _Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī_ would confirm that the derivation of _maʿnā_ truly is a puzzle with multiple answers. To contemplate its parameters is to uncover a paradigm for meaning in which noetic intention and phenomenological exposure are figurative correlates of bodily captivity and duress.
Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett K. Rowson, 2017
What is it like to be exposed on a cross? One place to look for answers is an 18-verse poem by ‘A... more What is it like to be exposed on a cross? One place to look for answers is an 18-verse poem by ‘Alī ibn al-Jahm, composed after he underwent this punishment by command of the caliph al-Mutawakkil in the year 239 A.H./853-4 CE. Searching ‘Alī's crucifixion poem for experiential data, this article finds instead a defiant masterwork of euphemism, and a palinodic stratagem for casting off shame, at the cost of some telling displacements and supressions.
Source: Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett Rowson, ed. Joseph L. Lowry and Shawkat M. Toorawa (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 67-93.
The Poem of the Bow is a landmark of early Arabic poetry. Aside from seven lines appearing in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cambridge UP, 1983), this is its first appearance in English. The German translation by Thomas Bauer, in his Altarabische Dichtkunst (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), vol. 2, 244-61, may also be read on academia.edu.
I was led to this poem by Ahmet Karamustafa's book God's Unruly Friends (Oxford/OneWorld, 1995), 122n13, with reference to the biographical dictionary Fawāt al-Wafayāt by al-Kutubī (d. 764/1363) where the poem was preserved. There is a German translation by Fritz Meier in Abu Sa'id-i Abu l-Hayr: Wirklichkeit und Legende (Brill, 1976), 505-6. It is an example of an Eastern muwashshaḥa, and like the muwashshaḥa poetry of al-Andalus it includes verses that are not in Arabic, but instead of proto-Castilian the language is Persian. (NB the author’s surname, indicating that his family was from the Muslim West.) | | | | | | | A word on the problematic word "gypsies" in stanza 4. Kristina Richardson, "Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature," Der Islam 94:1 (2017), 115-57, shows that the word gharīb (Arabic for "foreigner” and "stranger") was an ethnonym of the medieval Near East, used for a transient people who were the ancestors of today's Romani. So where the poem lapses into Persian to say "Hameh dervishan ghariban sargardan," I have made it say: "All dervishes are wandering gypsies." Any alternative would disguise the fact that a historical ethnic group is being named. In what may be compared to the pastoral mode, the poem idealizes dervishes and gypsies at the same time, and this is the defining ethos of the Qalandariyya mode in Islamic poetry.
Dear Kathleen: Essays on the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser's 80th Birthday, ed. Susan Gevirtz and S... more Dear Kathleen: Essays on the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser's 80th Birthday, ed. Susan Gevirtz and Stephen Motika (New York: Nightboat Books, 2017), 27-32.
This essay was written in honor of the poet Kathleen Fraser. It narrates my encounter with an Arabic poem widely attributed to "a woman of the Banū Asad," whose name is given by one 4th-/10th-century authority as Wasnā bint ʿĀmir. Voiced in the poem is the oblique reminiscence of a pre-Islamic rite of prayer for rain, such that the poem presents as a production of the mukhaḍram era (i.e. that generation of Arabs whose lives spanned the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods). There are reasons to doubt its provenance, and some of them are discussed here. The essay concludes with my translation of the poem.
My work on the poem is not yet finished. An article entitled "Choral projections in the ode of Wasnā bint ʿĀmir of the Banū Asad" (presented to the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song in September 2015, and at AOS in March 2017) is currently in progress.
In the winter of 2022, I was invited to blog on the subject of “Poetry and Translation” for Harri... more In the winter of 2022, I was invited to blog on the subject of “Poetry and Translation” for Harriet / Poetry Foundation. My posts are viewable at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/david-larsen, and in the PDF uploaded here, with illustrations by the author.
_Ghazal_ is the Arabic word for "amatory verse," and in other languages of the Islamic world it d... more _Ghazal_ is the Arabic word for "amatory verse," and in other languages of the Islamic world it designates a sonnet-like poetic form. The notion that the word stems from Arabic _ghazl_ "spinning thread" is widely held, despite the absence of support for this in classical lexicography and poetry criticism. Comparison to Semitic cognates points to an alternative derivation of ghazal from a verb of speaking—specifically, speech that is ambiguous and suggestive—by way of attraction to the gazelle (Arabic _ghazāl_), an ancient Near Eastern idiom for the beloved. While ghazal poetry emerged in Western Arabia during the first century of Islam, the genesis of ghazal as a term of art predates the literary record, as may be appreciated in a poem by ‘Amr ibn Qamī’a (6th century CE) that has been called the earliest complete qaṣīda in Arabic manuscript tradition.
Disputation Literature in the Near East and Beyond, 2020
Literary disputation is one of the oldest genres of world literature, with fictive speech-contest... more Literary disputation is one of the oldest genres of world literature, with fictive speech-contests between allegorical and personified beings going back to Sumerian times. It was especially fruitful in Islamic literature, where some ancient themes were perpetuated and new ones were instituted. One apparent novelty of the Islamic period was debate between Night and Day. It appears in Arabic prose of the 4th/10th century, Persian poetry of the 5th/11th, and eventually in Hebrew and Turkish, remaining a productive form up through the modern Nahḍa period. This article is a descriptive catalogue of arguments between Night and Day.
Approaches to the Study of Pre-modern Arabic Anthologies , 2021
My 2018 article "Meaning and Captivity in Classical Arabic Philology" (below) is one long exegesi... more My 2018 article "Meaning and Captivity in Classical Arabic Philology" (below) is one long exegesis of an anonymous pair of verses given out as the locus classicus for _maʿnā_, the Arabic word for "meaning." It took ten years to write, and in the tenth I found a source-text for the verses—a book now missing, but quoted in other books that are still around. It is the _Kitāb Abyāt al-ma‘ānī_ of Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī (d. 231/846), belonging to the genre of _kutub al-ma‘ānī_: anthologies of Arabic verses selected for their ambiguity, opacity, and the difficulty of grasping their meanings. | | | | | | | Needless to say, after working on these verses for so long, with a seriousness ordinarily reserved for fragments of Parmenides, I was much affected by the discovery that that they came from something like a book of riddles. What to do? My answer was to "double down" and begin collecting as many other fragments from _Kitāb Abyāt al-ma‘ānī_ as I could find. The resulting article presents what came of the effort. It is a work of philology, literary history, and homage to an unfamous scholar of the ninth century, and the capstone to "Meaning and Captivity," my first work of literary theory.
This article takes a close look at the word _maʿnā_ as analyzed by Abbasid-era authorities on the... more This article takes a close look at the word _maʿnā_ as analyzed by Abbasid-era authorities on the Arabic language, chiefly Ibn Fāris (d. 395 A.H./1004 CE). The word’s context-sensitivity and polysemy are well known; less well appreciated are the lexical and morphological preconditions for _maʿnā_’s diversity of meanings across the disciplines. Even less well studied (though widely quoted in lexicographical literature) is the anonymous basīṭ-meter couplet that Ibn Fāris cites in _al-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-lugha_ as a locus probans for the word. The speaker in these verses boasts of ransoming a bound captive (_ʿānī_), using _maʿnā_ to refer to the captive’s abject state.
There is evidence to suggest that the verses once featured in a lost work of the philologist Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī (d. 231/846) called _Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī_. This was an anthology of verses framed like riddles whose interpretations hinge on double meanings and rare metaphors, and its form and content may be judged by numerous outtakes preserved in later anthologies and lexica. The affiliation of Ibn Fāris’s verses to _Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī_ would confirm that the derivation of _maʿnā_ truly is a puzzle with multiple answers. To contemplate its parameters is to uncover a paradigm for meaning in which noetic intention and phenomenological exposure are figurative correlates of bodily captivity and duress.
Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett K. Rowson, 2017
What is it like to be exposed on a cross? One place to look for answers is an 18-verse poem by ‘A... more What is it like to be exposed on a cross? One place to look for answers is an 18-verse poem by ‘Alī ibn al-Jahm, composed after he underwent this punishment by command of the caliph al-Mutawakkil in the year 239 A.H./853-4 CE. Searching ‘Alī's crucifixion poem for experiential data, this article finds instead a defiant masterwork of euphemism, and a palinodic stratagem for casting off shame, at the cost of some telling displacements and supressions.
Source: Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett Rowson, ed. Joseph L. Lowry and Shawkat M. Toorawa (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 67-93.
The Poem of the Bow is a landmark of early Arabic poetry. Aside from seven lines appearing in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cambridge UP, 1983), this is its first appearance in English. The German translation by Thomas Bauer, in his Altarabische Dichtkunst (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), vol. 2, 244-61, may also be read on academia.edu.
I was led to this poem by Ahmet Karamustafa's book God's Unruly Friends (Oxford/OneWorld, 1995), 122n13, with reference to the biographical dictionary Fawāt al-Wafayāt by al-Kutubī (d. 764/1363) where the poem was preserved. There is a German translation by Fritz Meier in Abu Sa'id-i Abu l-Hayr: Wirklichkeit und Legende (Brill, 1976), 505-6. It is an example of an Eastern muwashshaḥa, and like the muwashshaḥa poetry of al-Andalus it includes verses that are not in Arabic, but instead of proto-Castilian the language is Persian. (NB the author’s surname, indicating that his family was from the Muslim West.) | | | | | | | A word on the problematic word "gypsies" in stanza 4. Kristina Richardson, "Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature," Der Islam 94:1 (2017), 115-57, shows that the word gharīb (Arabic for "foreigner” and "stranger") was an ethnonym of the medieval Near East, used for a transient people who were the ancestors of today's Romani. So where the poem lapses into Persian to say "Hameh dervishan ghariban sargardan," I have made it say: "All dervishes are wandering gypsies." Any alternative would disguise the fact that a historical ethnic group is being named. In what may be compared to the pastoral mode, the poem idealizes dervishes and gypsies at the same time, and this is the defining ethos of the Qalandariyya mode in Islamic poetry.
Dear Kathleen: Essays on the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser's 80th Birthday, ed. Susan Gevirtz and S... more Dear Kathleen: Essays on the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser's 80th Birthday, ed. Susan Gevirtz and Stephen Motika (New York: Nightboat Books, 2017), 27-32.
This essay was written in honor of the poet Kathleen Fraser. It narrates my encounter with an Arabic poem widely attributed to "a woman of the Banū Asad," whose name is given by one 4th-/10th-century authority as Wasnā bint ʿĀmir. Voiced in the poem is the oblique reminiscence of a pre-Islamic rite of prayer for rain, such that the poem presents as a production of the mukhaḍram era (i.e. that generation of Arabs whose lives spanned the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods). There are reasons to doubt its provenance, and some of them are discussed here. The essay concludes with my translation of the poem.
My work on the poem is not yet finished. An article entitled "Choral projections in the ode of Wasnā bint ʿĀmir of the Banū Asad" (presented to the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song in September 2015, and at AOS in March 2017) is currently in progress.
In the winter of 2022, I was invited to blog on the subject of “Poetry and Translation” for Harri... more In the winter of 2022, I was invited to blog on the subject of “Poetry and Translation” for Harriet / Poetry Foundation. My posts are viewable at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/david-larsen, and in the PDF uploaded here, with illustrations by the author.
Taqī al-Dīn Ibn al-Maghribī al-Baghdadī (d. 684 A.H./1285) was an Arabic poet of the early Mongol... more Taqī al-Dīn Ibn al-Maghribī al-Baghdadī (d. 684 A.H./1285) was an Arabic poet of the early Mongol period, now known only from biographical literature. In a _muwashshaḥa_ contained in the _Fawāt al-Wafayāt_ by al-Kutubī (d. 764/1363), there is a stanza in Persian which appears garbled in the edition by Ihsān 'Abbās. This draft paper (delivered in an MLA panel on "Persian in Arabic and Vice Versa: Multilingualism in the Premodern Islamic World," chaired by Lara Harb) gives my attempt at an emendation of the Persian verses, along with context for the poem and Ibn al-Maghribī's life. I welcome any comments to the emendation or anything else in the paper.
The virtual conference is co-organized by Huda Fakhreddine (University of Pennsylvania), David La... more The virtual conference is co-organized by Huda Fakhreddine (University of Pennsylvania), David Larsen (New York University), and Hany Rashwan (University of Birmingham), and hosted by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT), University of Oxford, 23-24 July 2021.
The premodern Islamic world was multilingual and multicultural, and by necessity was continually engaged in comparative critical practices. Mapping the interconnected trajectories of these practices, everywhere they arose between Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other language traditions of Asia and Africa, is the aim of this conference. We invite scholars to employ methodologies based on direct engagement with primary sources that negotiate the multilingual Islamic world(s) in ways that are overlooked or misunderstood by Comparative Literature.
The Mu`allaqat for Millennials, Pre-Islamic Arabic Golden Odes, published by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in cooperation with the AlQafilah Magazine, both initiatives of Saudi Aramco.
Aiming to make the mu`allaqat known to new readers, the project gathers a team of eight commentators and translators. They include Abdallah S. Alroshaid, Professor of Arabic Literature at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud University; Saudi writer and physician Adi Alherbish; New York University Clinical Associate Professor David Larsen; Huda J. Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania; Kevin Blankinship, Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at Brigham Young University; Saleh Said Alzahrani, Professor of Rhetoric and Criticism at Umm al-Qura University; Sami Abdulaziz AlAjlan, Assistant Professor of Literary Criticism at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud University; and Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.
Approaches to the Study of Pre-Modern Arabic Anthologies
Approaches to the Study of Pre-Modern Arabic Anthologies
Series:
Islamic History and Civilizatio... more Approaches to the Study of Pre-Modern Arabic Anthologies Series: Islamic History and Civilization, Volume: 180 Editors: Nadia Maria El Cheikh and Bilal Orfali Literary anthology is a general category of adab that encompasses a range of compilations which has enjoyed tremendous popularity in Arabic literature, probably like no other literature of the world. The aim of this volume is to raise and discuss questions about the different approaches to the study of pre-modern Arabic anthologies from the perspectives of philology, religion, history, geography, and literature.
Contributors: Lyall Armstrong, Carl Davila, Matthew L. Keegan, Boutheina Khaldi, Enass Khansa, Jeremy Kurzyniec, David Larsen, Nathaniel A. Miller, Suleiman A. Mourad, Hans-Peter Pökel, Isabel Toral
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Please support open-access publishing by downloading this article from the source: https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/smp/article/view/23740
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Needless to say, after working on these verses for so long, with a seriousness ordinarily reserved for fragments of Parmenides, I was much affected by the discovery that that they came from something like a book of riddles. What to do? My answer was to "double down" and begin collecting as many other fragments from _Kitāb Abyāt al-ma‘ānī_ as I could find. The resulting article presents what came of the effort. It is a work of philology, literary history, and homage to an unfamous scholar of the ninth century, and the capstone to "Meaning and Captivity," my first work of literary theory.
There is evidence to suggest that the verses once featured in a lost work of the philologist Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī (d. 231/846) called _Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī_. This was an anthology of verses framed like riddles whose interpretations hinge on double meanings and rare metaphors, and its form and content may be judged by numerous outtakes preserved in later anthologies and lexica. The affiliation of Ibn Fāris’s verses to _Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī_ would confirm that the derivation of _maʿnā_ truly is a puzzle with multiple answers. To contemplate its parameters is to uncover a paradigm for meaning in which noetic intention and phenomenological exposure are figurative correlates of bodily captivity and duress.
Source: Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett Rowson, ed. Joseph L. Lowry and Shawkat M. Toorawa (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 67-93.
Recipient of the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets
The Poem of the Bow is a landmark of early Arabic poetry. Aside from seven lines appearing in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cambridge UP, 1983), this is its first appearance in English. The German translation by Thomas Bauer, in his Altarabische Dichtkunst (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), vol. 2, 244-61, may also be read on academia.edu.
I was led to this poem by Ahmet Karamustafa's book God's Unruly Friends (Oxford/OneWorld, 1995), 122n13, with reference to the biographical dictionary Fawāt al-Wafayāt by al-Kutubī (d. 764/1363) where the poem was preserved. There is a German translation by Fritz Meier in Abu Sa'id-i Abu l-Hayr: Wirklichkeit und Legende (Brill, 1976), 505-6. It is an example of an Eastern muwashshaḥa, and like the muwashshaḥa poetry of al-Andalus it includes verses that are not in Arabic, but instead of proto-Castilian the language is Persian. (NB the author’s surname, indicating that his family was from the Muslim West.)
| | | | | | |
A word on the problematic word "gypsies" in stanza 4. Kristina Richardson, "Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature," Der Islam 94:1 (2017), 115-57, shows that the word gharīb (Arabic for "foreigner” and "stranger") was an ethnonym of the medieval Near East, used for a transient people who were the ancestors of today's Romani. So where the poem lapses into Persian to say "Hameh dervishan ghariban sargardan," I have made it say: "All dervishes are wandering gypsies." Any alternative would disguise the fact that a historical ethnic group is being named. In what may be compared to the pastoral mode, the poem idealizes dervishes and gypsies at the same time, and this is the defining ethos of the Qalandariyya mode in Islamic poetry.
This essay was written in honor of the poet Kathleen Fraser. It narrates my encounter with an Arabic poem widely attributed to "a woman of the Banū Asad," whose name is given by one 4th-/10th-century authority as Wasnā bint ʿĀmir. Voiced in the poem is the oblique reminiscence of a pre-Islamic rite of prayer for rain, such that the poem presents as a production of the mukhaḍram era (i.e. that generation of Arabs whose lives spanned the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods). There are reasons to doubt its provenance, and some of them are discussed here. The essay concludes with my translation of the poem.
My work on the poem is not yet finished. An article entitled "Choral projections in the ode of Wasnā bint ʿĀmir of the Banū Asad" (presented to the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song in September 2015, and at AOS in March 2017) is currently in progress.
Please support open-access publishing by downloading this article from the source: https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/smp/article/view/23740
| | | | | | |
Needless to say, after working on these verses for so long, with a seriousness ordinarily reserved for fragments of Parmenides, I was much affected by the discovery that that they came from something like a book of riddles. What to do? My answer was to "double down" and begin collecting as many other fragments from _Kitāb Abyāt al-ma‘ānī_ as I could find. The resulting article presents what came of the effort. It is a work of philology, literary history, and homage to an unfamous scholar of the ninth century, and the capstone to "Meaning and Captivity," my first work of literary theory.
There is evidence to suggest that the verses once featured in a lost work of the philologist Abū Naṣr al-Bāhilī (d. 231/846) called _Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī_. This was an anthology of verses framed like riddles whose interpretations hinge on double meanings and rare metaphors, and its form and content may be judged by numerous outtakes preserved in later anthologies and lexica. The affiliation of Ibn Fāris’s verses to _Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī_ would confirm that the derivation of _maʿnā_ truly is a puzzle with multiple answers. To contemplate its parameters is to uncover a paradigm for meaning in which noetic intention and phenomenological exposure are figurative correlates of bodily captivity and duress.
Source: Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett Rowson, ed. Joseph L. Lowry and Shawkat M. Toorawa (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 67-93.
Recipient of the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets
The Poem of the Bow is a landmark of early Arabic poetry. Aside from seven lines appearing in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cambridge UP, 1983), this is its first appearance in English. The German translation by Thomas Bauer, in his Altarabische Dichtkunst (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), vol. 2, 244-61, may also be read on academia.edu.
I was led to this poem by Ahmet Karamustafa's book God's Unruly Friends (Oxford/OneWorld, 1995), 122n13, with reference to the biographical dictionary Fawāt al-Wafayāt by al-Kutubī (d. 764/1363) where the poem was preserved. There is a German translation by Fritz Meier in Abu Sa'id-i Abu l-Hayr: Wirklichkeit und Legende (Brill, 1976), 505-6. It is an example of an Eastern muwashshaḥa, and like the muwashshaḥa poetry of al-Andalus it includes verses that are not in Arabic, but instead of proto-Castilian the language is Persian. (NB the author’s surname, indicating that his family was from the Muslim West.)
| | | | | | |
A word on the problematic word "gypsies" in stanza 4. Kristina Richardson, "Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature," Der Islam 94:1 (2017), 115-57, shows that the word gharīb (Arabic for "foreigner” and "stranger") was an ethnonym of the medieval Near East, used for a transient people who were the ancestors of today's Romani. So where the poem lapses into Persian to say "Hameh dervishan ghariban sargardan," I have made it say: "All dervishes are wandering gypsies." Any alternative would disguise the fact that a historical ethnic group is being named. In what may be compared to the pastoral mode, the poem idealizes dervishes and gypsies at the same time, and this is the defining ethos of the Qalandariyya mode in Islamic poetry.
This essay was written in honor of the poet Kathleen Fraser. It narrates my encounter with an Arabic poem widely attributed to "a woman of the Banū Asad," whose name is given by one 4th-/10th-century authority as Wasnā bint ʿĀmir. Voiced in the poem is the oblique reminiscence of a pre-Islamic rite of prayer for rain, such that the poem presents as a production of the mukhaḍram era (i.e. that generation of Arabs whose lives spanned the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods). There are reasons to doubt its provenance, and some of them are discussed here. The essay concludes with my translation of the poem.
My work on the poem is not yet finished. An article entitled "Choral projections in the ode of Wasnā bint ʿĀmir of the Banū Asad" (presented to the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song in September 2015, and at AOS in March 2017) is currently in progress.
The premodern Islamic world was multilingual and multicultural, and by necessity was continually engaged in comparative critical practices. Mapping the interconnected trajectories of these practices, everywhere they arose between Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other language traditions of Asia and Africa, is the aim of this conference. We invite scholars to employ methodologies based on direct engagement with primary sources that negotiate the multilingual Islamic world(s) in ways that are overlooked or misunderstood by Comparative Literature.
The Mu`allaqat for Millennials, Pre-Islamic Arabic Golden Odes, published by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in cooperation with the AlQafilah Magazine, both initiatives of Saudi Aramco.
Aiming to make the mu`allaqat known to new readers, the project gathers a team of eight commentators and translators. They include Abdallah S. Alroshaid, Professor of Arabic Literature at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud University; Saudi writer and physician Adi Alherbish; New York University Clinical Associate Professor David Larsen; Huda J. Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania; Kevin Blankinship, Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at Brigham Young University; Saleh Said Alzahrani, Professor of Rhetoric and Criticism at Umm al-Qura University; Sami Abdulaziz AlAjlan, Assistant Professor of Literary Criticism at Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud University; and Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.
At the helm are Hatem Alzahrani, Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at Umm al-Qura University, and Bander Alharbi, editor-in-chief of AlQafilah Magazine. You can read Professor Alzahrani’s published introduction here (https://arablit.org/2020/12/19/introducing-the-muallaqat-for-millennials/), and a report by the King Abdulaziz Center here (https://www.ithra.com/en/muallaqat/).
Series:
Islamic History and Civilization, Volume: 180
Editors: Nadia Maria El Cheikh and Bilal Orfali
Literary anthology is a general category of adab that encompasses a range of compilations which has enjoyed tremendous popularity in Arabic literature, probably like no other literature of the world. The aim of this volume is to raise and discuss questions about the different approaches to the study of pre-modern Arabic anthologies from the perspectives of philology, religion, history, geography, and literature.
Contributors: Lyall Armstrong, Carl Davila, Matthew L. Keegan, Boutheina Khaldi, Enass Khansa, Jeremy Kurzyniec, David Larsen, Nathaniel A. Miller, Suleiman A. Mourad, Hans-Peter Pökel, Isabel Toral