|
Approaches to Classical Arabic Poetry |
| Reprinted from the Middle East Studies
Association Bulletin, Winter 2002 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 2002 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America |
| Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic
Poetry, by M. C. Lyons. (Gibb Literary Studies 2) 366 pages, bibliography, index, appendix. Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1999. $59.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-90609-438-0 Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, by Abdullah al-Udhar. 241 pages. London: Saqi Books, 1999. $19.50 (Paper) ISBN 0-86356-047-4 These two volumes constitute additions—each in its different way—to the repertoire of works in English through which the classical tradition of Arabic poetry can be made more accessible to readers of English, and especially to specialists in the various fields of Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. It should be noted here that the much abused adjective ‘classical’ is appropriately used in the titles cited above in that both works deal with the period ending at approximately the twelfth century to which Arab culture looks for the expression of its core values and ideals. Lyons’s Identification and Identity is the result of an enormous amount of (one suspects, a scholarly lifetime’s) research, presented with a breadth of erudition—references to other literary and cultural traditions, most notably that of Latin and Greek—that is typical of this distinguished scholar. Placed alongside the other major contribution to the field that has accompanied his retirement from the Chair of Arabic at Cambridge University, his monumental reference work on the popular narratives of Arabic,[49] this work displays a similar range and talent for organization and summary. Lyons offers his readers an analytical survey of the themes culled from a selection of diwans of individual poets and collections of classical Arabic poetry (and one of the ‘popular’ kan wa-kan genre). Some forty poets are represented, from the earliest poetry of the pre-Islamic (jahili) period up to al-Mutanabbi and the muwashshahat tradition that originated in the Iberian peninsula. In each chapter a particular period or theme and its poets (one chapter is devoted to Abu Nuwas alone [chapter 7]) are analyzed in terms of their treatment of such topics as time and place, and of well-known themes of the classical Arabic poem such as wine, animals, and women (and the linkages via imagery between those themes). Through further appraisals of both patronage and the title-theme-identity, there are also astute assessments of the ways in which the poetry and the status of the poet underwent change and, at certain stages within the poetic tradition, did not. Following the eleven chapters and a conclusion, there is an immensely useful appendix in which the various themes and topoi that have been identified and explored within each chapter are listed alphabetically so that it becomes possible to see the ways in which particular images were used, reused, and transformed over the course of the many centuries of the classical tradition of Arabic poetry. Identification and Identity, then, is indeed a work gathered from many years of careful analysis and cataloguing, a work of immense erudition. It is, it would appear, intended primarily for scholars, current and incipient, essentially a reference work to be dipped into for information on poets and images rather than to be read straight through—a process that only emphasizes the repetitive nature of the treatment involved. Since the succession of chapters that I noted above carries no titles in the listing of contents (but merely the number of the chapter), it becomes the task of the reader to identify what the unifying principle for each chapter is. I found myself inserting such possible titles in the review copy: poetry of the pre-Islamic period (chapter 1), the Prophetic period (chapter 2), badi` poetry (chapter 6), love poetry (chapter 9), and so on. Such demands on the reader’s prior knowledge, emphasized by the simple listing of the diwans surveyed in each chapter following the book’s introduction (“Sources,” pp. 13-17), seem to serve as further evidence of the work's implied readership. Bearing in mind the illustrious history of the Gibb series in which this volume appears, one might also express the wish that the production of the book could have been somewhat more reader-friendly: the pages are extremely ‘busy,’ with narrow margins and forty-two-line pages—all making for tiring reading. Furthermore, my copy was beginning to lose its binding before I had even completed the review process. Of these two works, Udhari’s Classical Poems is by far the more problematic. It announces itself as a “bilingual anthology” of poems composed by women in Arabic, prefaced with an introduction. The concept is an excellent one, bringing the largely overlooked artistry of the secluded gender to the attention of a much larger and culturally different readership. As it emerges, however, this volume is a mixed blessing. The collection is subdivided according to the traditional, dynastic principle of periodization of the ‘classical’ period generally utilized in Arabic and Islamic studies. The selection of poets is both large and comprehensive, covering the Jahili (pre-Islamic) period (twelve poets), the ‘Islamic’ (two), the Umayyad (nine), and the Abbasid (twenty), as well as the Iberian Peninsula (al-Andalus) (twenty-one). Among many points of a historical nature that might be raised is the question as to whether, even allowing for the mingling of myth and annalistic history, a poem composed by “Mahd al-Aadiyya” can really be dated to 4,000 BCE. With regard to issues connected with the ‘texts’ themselves, we find that, while an English version of each poem is juxtaposed to a version printed in Arabic (pretentiously called “Arabiyya” here), the former is far from being a ‘translation’ of the Arabic original. Each English text is more in the nature of a highly selective paraphrase of the Arabic original, and the reasoning behind such selectivity is not at all clear. Udhari describes the resulting texts as “voicecopies”; the English versions, we are told, “flow in their new paraline [paragraph line] form” (p. 22). While there are, of course, intense debates about the nature, purpose, and readership of ‘translation,’ and especially that of poetry all the way back to al-Jahiz’s declaration of its undesirability, it needs to be noted that in this particular collection a not insignificant portion of the original poems is omitted as part of this process of cultural transfer. When all is said and done, however, “I wish Barraq had eyes to see the painful state I’m in***Kulaib, Uqail, Junaid, damn you brothers, I'm your sister, help me out” does not, at least for this reader, sound much like a poem (whether or not it manages to “flow into a new paraline form” (whatever that means). Indeed “help me out” seems a less than adequate equivalent of “sa`idu-ni bi-al-buka'” (pp. 34 and 35) under any terms of reference for the translation process, quite apart from the plodding colloquial quality of the English. Elsewhere the situation becomes worse, as, for example, when the Arabic of the renowned poet, Rabi`ah al-`Adawiyyah: “fa-al-jismu minni li-al-jalisi mu'anisun” is rendered as “my body is for the entertaining sitter” (pp. 102 and 103). One could continue in this vein, but, in that I find no consistency about translation method and the resulting versions seem minimally poetic (even when they manage to convey some or most of the significances of the original poems), there is little point in prolonging the argument. Then there is the introduction. In the context of published translations the question often arises as to whether such introductions are really necessary. This particular introduction is eminently skippable. The reversal of centuries of relative neglect of these compositions by female poets certainly calls for a different attitude towards the scant data that are available, but it is surely a step too far in the opposite direction to talk of the pre-Islamic period in terms of some kind of female polyandric paradise and then to suggest that “[T]he process of women containment [sic] was started by the Prophet Muhammad” (p. 14). Such vigorous apologetics may perhaps be a timely antidote to scholarly neglect in both the Arab world itself and in the various Western (and Eastern) scholarly traditions, but the hyperbolic tone reaches the level of the outrageous with: “There are no definitive editions of the work of any poet nor comprehensive studies of poets or periods. All the existing studies of Arab poetry are generalizations based on rehashed or unstudied opinions” (p. 15). Bearing in mind work by Salma Jayyusi, Andras Hamori, Philip Kennedy, James Montgomery, and Suzanne Stetkevych, to cite just a few recent works published in English, it would appear that Udhari is not as familiar with the current research on Arabic poetry as his brash statement might imply. This then is potentially an important project. Indeed the very process of anthologizing the names of so many unfamiliar poets has provided a useful historical survey. Nevertheless, the closer one approaches the poetic essence of the verses themselves, the less useful this volume becomes. |
| [49] The Arabian Epic, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). |
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