{"id":14943,"date":"2016-09-14T11:59:28","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T15:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=14943"},"modified":"2016-09-15T15:48:51","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T19:48:51","slug":"a-poem-by-abu-sakhr-al-hudhali-as-transmitted-by-abu-ali-al-qali","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/a-poem-by-abu-sakhr-al-hudhali-as-transmitted-by-abu-ali-al-qali\/","title":{"rendered":"A poem by Abu Sakhr al-Hudhali, as transmitted by Abu Ali al-Qali"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

It gives me great pleasure to publish David Larsen’s translations & introductions on this core text of 8 century poems with 10 century comments from the classical, though unhappily too little known (at least in Euro-American lands) Arab literary tradition. See also his translation of al Sukkari’s version of the same poem on my Jacket2 blog<\/a>.<\/em>
\n\"screen-shot-2016-09-13-at-7-28-39-pm\"<\/a>
\nThe curtailment of artistic freedom is an unusual thing to praise. Literary translation is a special art, though, and it is founded on constraint. What is the translator free to create, but an accurate target-language representation of the source text? Stylistic freedom lies in the translator’s working conception of accuracy itself (i.e., its standards and defining principles, and the degree of rigor with which they are followed). And with that I am straying into issues of translation that are not my theme. My concern here is more for the translator’s responsibility to source con<\/u>text than source text.<\/p>\n

With regard to Arabic, it is a lively concern. Classical Arabic poetry is a deeply embedded tradition, and its productions are hard to appreciate ex situ<\/i>. Individual works are cast against a plurality of contextual and generic backdrops, which (until source tradition becomes better known to target-language readers) it is up to the translator to describe. And so the translator of Arabic poetry is forever explaining<\/i>. The alternative is to make short extracts from longer poems – choice, unobscure excerpts that stand on their own in lyric snatches. This is the method most commonly followed in anthologies today (e.g., Night and Horses and the Desert<\/i>), and there is much to recommend it – above all, ease of absorption by the target-language reader. There is also classical precedent: many medieval anthologies are made up of poetic outtakes, and if modern editors (Arab and Western) do the same it is somewhat defensible.<\/p>\n

That said, it is a mode of presentation that contributes little to awareness of poetic form. Especially this is true of the “high” Arabic form, which is the qa\u1e63\u012bda – a multithematic form embracing several genres in succession (typically though not necessarily: amatory complaint, travelogue, and praise or blame). You can take one section out and make an exemplary fragment of it, but you can’t call it a qa\u1e63\u012bda, which is the form the early poets were working in.<\/p>\n

Another problem with the excerptive method in translation is Orientalist precedent. A “series of representative fragments” is after all the Orientalist translator’s native medium, as Edward Said says in part two of Chapter Two. The result, however – a mosaiform stand-in for source tradition, mined for its target-language reader-friendly content – is something I hesitate to call a replica or simulacrum of anything. An English-language anthology of Arabic fragments is more like a limit-marker, ensuring that Western tastes for Arabic poetry will run only so far, and no further.<\/p>\n

Least of all do I imagine editorial completism as a political solution. Indeed, there is reason to doubt the activist\/humanist applications of Arabic-to-English translation tout court<\/i>. Elliott Colla’s article “Dragomen and Checkpoints” for The Translator<\/i> 21:2 (2015) 132-53, points out that far from being an antidote to conflict, translation has always been an instrument of military occupation and colonial rule. And by way of Cicero’s call for Roman translators “to wrest from now-languishing Greece” the intellectual capital of a subjugated people (Tusculan Disputations<\/i> II.2.5), Dimitri Gutas reminds us of translation’s long-standing triumphalist commitments, in his article “The Historical and Ideological Dimensions of Graeco-Arabic Studies” for Intellectual History of the Islamicate World<\/i> 3 (2015), 326\u201350. I hasten therefore to disavow any claim that a formally principled approach to translation can ameliorate anything outside the literary realm.<\/p>\n

For me, it is enough. If a global English-language readership is better able to access Arabic poetry, it is all the justification my efforts need. With that, I return to the question of what to do with poems that circulate in different versions. This is not a genre issue, but one of historical practice. The variation displayed in the present poem is an organic result of the still-primarily-oral information culture in which anthologists of the ninth and tenth centuries (CE) were working. There being no grounds for authenticating one at the expense of another, I have contrived to translate them all and publish them here and here<\/a> and here<\/a>, with the duplicate lines duplicated exactly wherever they occur in each version. If this variform state is not the “original” state of the 7th-century poem, it is the only state in which we can access it today.<\/p>\n

As Ab\u016b \u2018Al\u012b Ism\u0101\u2018\u012bl al-Q\u0101l\u012b’s introduction makes clear, it is a composite<\/i> state. Al-Q\u0101l\u012b was an eminent philologist and litterateur who, after long study in Mosul and Baghdad, emigrated to Cordoba with his library in 942. The books he could not bring with him he dictated from memory after his arrival, and until his death in 966 he remained in al-Andalus as a revered source of Iraqi learning. His Dictations<\/i> run to four volumes in the 1926 Cairo edition, and it is here (vol. 1, p. 148) we read that Ab\u016b \u2018Al\u012b said:<\/p>\n

“I was told by Ab\u016b Bakr ibn al-Anb\u0101r\u012b (d. 940): ‘The grammarian Abu ‘l-\u2018Abb\u0101s A\u1e25mad ibn Ya\u1e25y\u0101 (known as Tha\u2018lab, d. 904) said: Ab\u016b Sa\u2018\u012bd \u2018Abd All\u0101h b. Shab\u012bb said: “I heard this poem in recitation by Ism\u0101\u2018\u012bl b. Ab\u012b Uways (d. 840), and also by al-Zubayr b. Ab\u012b Bakk\u0101r (d. 870), and also by \u2018Abd al-Malik b. \u2018Abd al-Az\u012bz al-M\u0101jish\u016bn, and also by Mu\u1e25ammad b. \u1e6c\u0101l\u016bt al-W\u0101d\u012b.” And my father [Ab\u016b Mu\u1e25ammad al-Anb\u0101r\u012b, d. ca. 916] recited it to me too. All these men credited the poem to Ab\u016b \u1e62akhr al-Hudhal\u012b, each of them adding a part to the whole<\/b> (yaz\u012bdu ba\u2018\u1e0duhum \u2018al\u0101 ba\u2018\u1e0d<\/i>).’ And [al-Q\u0101l\u012b continues] Ab\u016b Bakr ibn Durayd (d. 933) recited some of it to me too.”<\/p>\n

From this it is evident that al-Q\u0101l\u012b’s version of the poem goes back to Ibn Shab\u012bb (d. ca. 873), a savant of Basra whom al-Dhahab\u012b (d. 1347) calls “one of the most erudite men of his day, despite the unreliability of his memory.” Weakness of memory is a significant disqualifier for a scholar of hadith, and Ibn Shab\u012bb is remembered instead as an akhb\u0101r\u012b<\/i> (a gatherer of instructive reports). In the 10th-century bibliography called al-Fihrist<\/i>, he is credited with a now-lost Book of Reports and Traditions<\/i>, but the present poem was probably not included in this work. Rather, it was dictated orally to Tha\u2018lab, the grammarian of Kufa who passed it on to al-Q\u0101l\u012b’s teacher Ibn al-Anb\u0101r\u012b. What al-Q\u0101l\u012b gives us might be thought of as a third-generation “snapshot” of the poem as pieced together by Ibn Shab\u012bb and Ibn al-Anb\u0101r\u012b before him.<\/p>\n

Whether this version of the poem is compromised by Ibn Shab\u012bb’s alleged weakness of memory is a question voided by comparison to the other versions, which are no closer to each other than they to al-Q\u0101l\u012b’s version. It is unquestionably a genuinely early poem: a generation before Ibn Shab\u012bb, four of its verses appeared in the \u1e24am\u0101sa<\/i> of Ab\u016b Tamm\u0101m (d. ca. 845), and a generation before that the singer Ibr\u0101h\u012bm ibn al-Mahd\u012b put some of its verses to music for the caliph al-Am\u012bn (r. 809-813), whose uncle he was (see Abu ‘l-Faraj al-I\u1e63bah\u0101n\u012b’s postscript<\/a> to the poem as it appears in The Book of Songs<\/i>). The poem’s multiply divergent condition probably dates to the 8th century, if not all the way back to Ab\u016b \u1e62akhr’s lifetime (for which see my introduction to al-Sukkar\u012b’s version<\/a>).<\/p>\n

In the 1926 printed edition of al-Q\u0101l\u012b’s Dictations<\/i>, as in manuscript, the poem is interrupted in places where al-Q\u0101l\u012b mentions his teachers’ sources and their glosses to the poem, as well as two peripheral remarks by Ibn Shab\u012bb. This poses another editorial dilemma. Should interlinear commentary be exported to footnotes, so as to smooth the reception of Ab\u016b \u1e62akhr’s poem? Or is the commentary better left in place? I am pleased to be able to try out both solutions. Where this translation appears in the Cambridge Literary Review<\/i><\/a>‘s forthcoming tenth issue (fittingly dedicated to the theme of marginalia and annotations), I have rendered much of the commentary as footnotes. Here, where footnotes are not so easily accommodated, I have left the commentary in place (set off by a change in text color)<\/span> – at some detriment to the flow of the translated poem, but affording the English-language reader an experience of the classical editorial practices to which we owe our access to the poem in the first place. [My own supplementary language is in square brackets.]<\/p>\n

\u2666\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2666\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2666<\/div>\n

AT DH\u0100T AL-JAYSH I recognized one dwelling as Layl\u0101’s,
\n  and another at Dh\u0101t al-Bayn, with tell-tale markings.
\nEven now I picture them as if unaltered,
\n  even though both dwellings were long made away with since our time.
\nAt a halt by their outline, the answer [I sought] was stammered,
\n  and I said, my eye astream with a flowing tear,
\n<\/a>“O riders trotting by, have you news from the valleys of al-\u1e24im\u0101
\n  and who might be abiding there since our time?”
\n“We passed that way by night,” they said. “If someone
\n  for whom you pine be there, the wayfarer has no knowledge.”<\/p>\n


\nTha\u2018lab said: Ibn Shab\u012bb said: A B\u0101hil\u012b tribeswoman named Umm al-Mighw\u0101r said: “Early one morning, I was in the courtyard of my house when there passed a party of mounted riders. They put me in mind of this verse [which I recited aloud]: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201dO riders trotting by, have you news from the valleys of al-\u1e24im\u0101<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0and who might be abiding there since our time?”<\/span><\/p>\n

We were answered by a boy from atop his mount, who recited:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0“We passed that way by night,” they said. “If someone<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0for whom you pine be there, the wayfarer has no knowledge.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Can the bushes answer questions? Or the acacia of al-Kad\u0101,
\nsubtribal redoubt of Marr\u0101n? My two companions! What about the lotus tree?<\/p>\n


\nIn the recitation of Ibn al-Anb\u0101r\u012b, on the authority of Tha\u2018lab, the place’s name is al-Kad\u0101<\/i>. In my estimation, this is a shortening of the name al-Kad\u0101\u2019<\/i> [with final hamza<\/i>], due to metrical necessity. Ibn Durayd for his part said the word was al-Ku<\/b>d\u0101<\/i>, calling it a plural of al-kudya<\/i> [Arabic for “beggary”].
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

By the One Who gives cause for weeping and laughter, the One Who
\n  deals death and life, and the One entitled to give command:
\nHer plans were for permanent departure, absolute
\n  at dawn’s first light, [the night] I made my way to her.
\nCatching sight of her [preparations], I was struck dumb,
\n  abandoned by all cleverness and all reserve.
\nAnd I forgot the trifles I’d come to say, like a drinker
\n  whose power to remember is robbed by wine,
\nShe left me without a shred [of hope] to go by,
\n  nor a bone without a break in all my ribcage.
\nShe left me jealous of the wild animals I see in pairs
\n  that may give in to fright but never scatter.
\nI might be excused for calling out the wrong
\n  she did me on that day, but my blame has its limits.
\nIf it were made known to me that she was departing
\n  I could not have endured it, and [for my sake] she was afraid.
\nI don’t know if life goes on for me, after her departure.
\n  What [terrible extremes] her departure puts me though!
\nTo all love but \u2018\u0100mir\u012b love, my heart is resistant.
\n  “Ab\u016b \u2018Amr without the \u2018amr<\/i>,” you could call it.<\/p>\n


\n[This verse’s play on words resists translation. \u2018Amr<\/i> is a word for “lifespan,” and also a man’s name: “Father of a Lifeless Life,” he names his heart. The verse comes with Ibn Shab\u012bb’s commentary on the lovesick madness called “\u2018\u0100mir\u012b love,” after the legendary lover Qays ibn al-Mulawwa\u1e25 al-\u2018\u0100mir\u012b, better known as Majn\u016bn Layl\u0101:] Ibn Shab\u012bb said: I was told by al-Zubayr ibn Bakk\u0101r: “When Abu ‘l-S\u0101\u2019ib Salm ibn Jun\u0101da recited this verse to me, he said: ‘By God, it is the red death (al-mawt al-a\u1e25mar<\/i>), nephew, and there is no defense against it. ‘”<\/span><\/p>\n

My hands are close to dampness when I touch her.
\n  She is [like a pool] ringed with plants of leafy gold.
\nMemory of you stirs up in me a violent elation,
\n  like a rain-drenched sparrow shaking off [its wings].
\nMy love for \u2018Ulayya makes me wish we were
\n  secluded on a raft with nothing else between us,
\namid calm waters, whose undulating surface no ship crosses,
\n  far from the [high sea’s] terrors and green eddies,
\nthat we might bring our souls’ anxiety to a carefree end,
\n  and the sea drag down the slanderer we dread.
\nThe lengths that time went through to come between us
\n  were amazing. Done with what was between us, time stood still.<\/p>\n


\nIbn Shab\u012bb said: These are the verses I heard from Ibn Ab\u012b Uways:<\/span>
\nO love I feel for Layl\u0101! You have spared me nothing.
\n  To the anguish of abandonment, you add still more.
\nO love! Let nothing halt the nightly increase
\n  of my ardor for her. Let the Day of Resurrection be my relief.
\nThe evenings we spent at al-\u1e24im\u0101 will never return,
\n  not even with the petals of the flowering mimosa.
\nThe times gone by are never coming back around \u2013 blessings
\n  and thanks to [the Creator]! All that happens is according to Your plan.<\/p>\n


\nIbn al-Anb\u0101r\u012b said: My father related these additional verses to me on the authority of A\u1e25mad b. \u2018Ubayd (known as Ab\u016b \u2018A\u1e63\u012bda, d. 885):<\/span><\/p>\n

I took my leave of you, until you said: “He is oblivious to displeasure.”
\n  I paid you visits until you said, “He cannot endure [much longer].”
\nRight you are! I am a lovesick fool, assailed
\n  by torments of a heart-pervading passion, or some sorcery.
\nBeloved are all living things, as long as you may live,
\n  and when a grave contain you, beloved be the dead!<\/p>\n

\u2666\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2666\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2666<\/div>\n

Source: Ab\u016b \u2018Al\u012b Ism\u0101\u2018\u012bl b. al-Q\u0101sim al-Q\u0101l\u012b, Kit\u0101b al-Am\u0101l\u012b<\/i>, ed. Mu\u1e25ammad \u2018Abd al-Jaw\u0101d A\u1e63ma\u2018\u012b. Cairo: Ma\u1e6dba\u2018at D\u0101r al-Kutub al-Mi\u1e63riyya, 1926 (4 vols.). Repr. Beirut: D\u0101r al-Kutub al-\u2018Ilmiyya, 2002 (4 vols. in 2). I. 148-50<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For more information on Ab\u016b \u1e62akhr and his tribe’s role in the development of ghazal poetry, see TK<\/a>. For the musical settings of Ab\u016b \u1e62akhr’s poem, see my post on the tumblr Lyric Poets<\/a>. And for yet another version of the poem, as attributed to Majn\u016bn Layl\u0101, see my translation blog Writing Gathering Field<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It gives me great pleasure to publish David Larsen’s translations & introductions on this core text of 8 century poems with 10 century comments from the classical, though unhappily too little known (at least...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,1442,91,94,103],"tags":[1883,1882,1881],"class_list":["post-14943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arab-culture","category-arabic","category-mashreq","category-poetry","category-poets","category-translation","tag-abu-ali-al-qali","tag-abu-sakhr-al-hudhali","tag-david-larsen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14943"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14972,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14943\/revisions\/14972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}