Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry

Notes

281 Notes Introduction 1. Jirji Zaydan (d. 1914) quoted in Vicente Cantarino, Arabic Poetics in the Golden Age (Leiden: Brill, 1975), epigraph. 2. Wilhelm Ahlwardt quoted in Jaroslav Stetkevych, “Arabic Poetry and Assorted Poetics,” in Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, ed. Malcolm H. Kerr (Malibu: Udena, 1980), 112; A. S. Tritton, s.v. “Shi‘r,” EI1 . The same negative evaluation has often been made by Western scholars about classical Persian poetry, although recently the validity of this evaluation has been cast in grave doubt. See Julie Scott Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 3. See translation and discussion of Phaedrus excerpts in G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics (London: Methuen, 1965), 58; Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 67. 4. Samuel Johnson, Selected Essays (London: Penguin, 2003), 101–2. 5. Wen-chin Ouyang, Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1997), 203. 6. Johnson stresses, though, that the critic is obligated to be open-minded and fair, “for the duty of criticism is neither to depreciate, nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate” (187). 7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), 10. 8. G. J. H. van Gelder, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 201ff; G. J. H. van Gelder, “Genres in Collision: Nasib and Hija’,” JAL 21 (1990): 22. 9. On ring composition, see Mary Douglas’s important new study, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007). 10. I am not suggesting that structure is variable. A distinction is to be made here between a work’s structure, which is inherent, and its overall significance, which is subjectively determined. 282 Notes to Pages xvii–3 Readers may well have their differences over the precise significance of a sonnet, for example, but the poem remains a sonnet. 11. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 3–4. Note on Translation and Transliteration 1. See the translations, respectively, by A. J. Arberry (The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature [London: Allen and Unwin, 1957], 61–66), Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993], 249–57), and Alan Jones (Early Arabic Poetry, vol. 2 [Oxford: Ithaca Press, 1996], 55–86); chapter 2: Michael Sells (“Shanfara’s Lamiyya: A New Version,” Al-‘Arabiyya 16 [1983]: 5–25), Alan Jones (Early Arabic Poetry, vol. 1 [Oxford: Ithaca Press, 1992], 139–84), and Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (Mute Immortals, 143–50); chapter 3: A. J. Arberry (Seven Odes, 142–47), William R. Polk (The Golden Ode [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974], 3–177), Michael Sells (Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1989], 35–44), Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (Mute Immortals, 9–18), and Alan Jones (Early Arabic Poetry, 2:166–202); and chapter 10: James T. Monroe (Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology [Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias, 2004], 178–86) and Michael Sells (“The Nuniyya [Poem in N] of Ibn Zaydun,” Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus, ed. María Menocal et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000], 491–96). Although the renditions in these four chapters reflect my own readings of the poems—as do perforce the ones in the other chapters—at times they follow closely the previous renditions, particularly the ones by Michael Sells. 1. The Triumph of Imru’ al-Qays 1. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (d. 967), Kitab al-aghani [The Book of Songs], ed. Ibrahim alAbyari , vol. 9 (Cairo: Dar al-Sha‘b, 1969), 3207. 2. In reality, Emperor Justinian was childless. 3. Irfan Shahid, “The Last Days of Imru’ al-Qays: Anatolia,” in Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Literature, ed. Issa J. Boullata and Terri DeYoung (Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 1997), 207–22. 4. Arberry, Seven Odes, 39–41. 5. Salomon Gandz, “Die Mu‘allaqa des Imrulqais,” Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien 170 (1913): 3, quoted in Michael Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1978), 42. 6. This...