by Robert Irwin
Jahili poets tended to stress place names, such as Ed Dakhool and Haumal, which they valued precisely for their capacity to summon up memories of times past. The colocynth is a kind of bitter cucumber. Toothpicks (masawik) played an important part in Arab social life. Ishil is a type of tamarisk tree. Duwár refers to pagan idols round whom it was customary to circumambulate. ‘Duwár virgins’ presumably attended the shrines of those idols.
English translations of Arab poems differ widely and sometimes when reading several versions of a passage I have wondered if their translators were actually working on the same poem. Here, for comparative purposes, I offer part of a more recent translation of the opening lines and part of an older translation of the concluding lines of Imru’ al-Qays’s poem. Howarth and Shukrullah’s version dispenses with all the proper names that are found in the original (making it appear that the poet could not be bothered to remember the names of the women he had slept with). They have also expunged some of the exotic detail, such as Imru’ al-Qays’s comparison of himself to an exploding colocynth. It is more modern than Arberry’s translation and briefer too. In some ways it is more immediately accessible, but it is also less fleshily sensual, more abstract and, at times, more obscure.
Beyond that reef of sand, recalling a house
And a lady, dismount where the winds cross
Cleaning the still extant traces of colony between
Four famous dunes. Like pepper-seeds in the distance
The dung of white stags in courtyards and cisterns,
Resin blew, hard on the eyes, one morning
Beside the acacia watching the camels going.
And now, for all remonstrance and talk of patience
I will grieve, somewhere in this comfortless ruin
And make a place and my peace with the past.
There were good days with the clover-smelling wenches.
Best by the pool when I caught a clan drenching.
I brought them in file to beg their things back,
Playing for one that hung back; and paid them,
All but her, with fat like tassels of satin,
Chops from the fast camel I slaughtered. But her
I forced to ride in a topheavy howdah,
Tilting along with me by her, her tattling
Of illegal burdening of beasts, and I tickling
Her senses, and dropping the reins, and cropping the quinces.
Howarth and Shukrullah, Images from the Arab World, p. 36
Sir Charles Lyall (1845–1920) was, after the eighteenth-century pioneer Sir William Jones, the first great British translator of Arabic poems, and although his versions are inevitably somewhat archaic, they are still esteemed by many who are in a position to judge. Unlike most translators, Lyall sought to imitate the metre (which is tawil).
‘O friend – see the lightning there! it flickered, and now is gone,
as though flashed a pair of hands in the pillar of crownèd cloud.
Nay, was its blaze, or the lamps of a hermit that dwells alone,
and pours o’er the twisted wicks the oil from his slender cruse?
We sat there my fellows and I twixt Darij and al-'Udhaib,
and gazed as the distance gloomed, and waited its oncoming.
The right of its mighty rain advanced over Katan’s ridge:
the left of its trailing skirt swept Yadhbul and as-Sitár;
then over Kutaifah’s steep the flood of its onset drave,
and headlong before its storm the tall trees were borne to the ground;
And the drift of its waters passed o’er the crags of al-Kanan,
and drave forth the white-legged deer from the refuge they sought therein.
And Taima – it left not there the stem of a palm aloft,
nor ever a tower, save one firm built upon the living rock.
And when first its mighty shroud bore down upon Mount Thabir,
he stood like an ancient man in a grey-streaked mantle wrapt.
The clouds cast their burden down on the broad plain of al-Ghabit,
as a trader from al-Yaman unfolds bales from his store;
And the topmost crest on the morrow of al-Mujaimir’s cairn
was heaped with the flood-borne wrack like wool on a distaff wound.
At earliest dawn on the morrow the birds were chirping blithe,
as though they had drunk draughts of riot in fiery wine;
And at even the drowned beasts lay where the torrent had borne them, dead,
high up on the valley sides, like earth-stained roots of squills.
Lyall, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, pp. 103–4
Pre-Islamic poetry has been relatively well covered in English translation. For those who wish to compare variant renderings, see versions by W. A. Clouston, Arabian Poetry for English Readers (Glasgow, 1881); W. S. Blunt, The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia (London, 1903); Charles Greville Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry: 162 Poems from Imrulkais to Ma'arri (London, 1985); Desmond O’Grady, The Seven Arab Odes (London, 1990); Alan Jones, Early Arabic Poetry, vol. 2, Select Odes (Reading, 1996). Jones’s version is particularly recommended for its detailed, scholarly commentary.
Pre-Islamic poetry dealt with desperate battles, despairing love, oaths of honour, grand gestures of hospitality, bitter blood feuds and suchlike subject matter. If sixth- or seventh-century town-dwelling traders in horsehair, leather saddles and honey composed poetry, their work has not survived. The poetry of the period preserves the high language of the Arabic people, the language used for speaking of great and tragic matters. Whether the Jahili Arabs actually spoke like that on a day-to-day basis is debatable. Poetry was composed to be recited publicly, often in competition at trade fairs. Sometimes the poet recited his own work, but often the performance was given by a rawi, a ‘transmitter’. Most of the great poets had one or two rawis who acted as publicists for their chosen master. They memorized their poet’s verses, recited them, provided a context for their composition and explained their verses in detail. The existence of such public performers who were prepared to comment on and explain the works that they were performing allowed the authors of qasidas to be elliptical and allusive, and thus the poem did not have to tell the whole story. Some rawis went so far as to improve and extend the works they were supposed to be transmitting. Many important poets served apprenticeships as rawis and received training from the poet they served; for example, Imru’ al-Qays is supposed to have started as a rawi. Later on, in the Islamic period, some of the most important anthologists were rawis. Hammad al-Rawiyya (694–772), one of the most famous rawis, was also an anthologist and probably the first to make a selection of seven Mu'allaqat. Rawis kept an eye on each other to stay abreast of the competition.
Although most poems must have been committed to memory and transmitted orally, it is possible that some pre-Islamic poets were literate and produced written anthologies. This particularly applies to poets attached to the court of the Ghassanids, a client Arab dynasty of the Byzantines in southern Syria, and to those in the service of the Lakhmids, a client Arab dynasty of Sassanian Persians in southern Iraq.
'ANTARA IBN SHADDAD was perhaps the most famous of the warrior-poets of pre-Islamic times. 'Antara (whose name means ‘valiant’) was a ‘crow’ – that is to say, he was a child of mixed birth, for though his father was an Arab, his mother was black. 'Antara grew up as a slave and he was only freed during a military crisis when his tribe, the Abs, had need of his fighting abilities. 'Antara was the epitome of chivalry. His love for Abla, a young woman of his tribe, was legendary and doomed, because his servile origin meant that the tribe would not recognize him as her equal. In later centuries his fictitious martial exploits became the subject of a popular epic, the Sir at 'Antar (see Chapter 7).
'Antara’s poetry is relatively simple in style. One of his qasidas was honoured by being chosen as one of the Mu'allaqat. However, the verses below are extracted from another qasida.
In the mornin
g she came to me to scare me of fate,
as if charmed I had risen against its caprice.
‘Doom is a pool,’ I told her then,
‘And to drink one day is my destined lot,
so keep your silence, woman, and know:
This man, unless slain, is fated to die.’
Yet doom, if shaped in the flesh, would appear
in mine when the enemy, cornered, dismount.
On the spear side second to none of 'Abs,
with the sword I defend my distaff side;
when squadrons flaring to war engage
my mettle tells more than ancestral pride;
full well the hero-horsemen know
that by cut and thrust I broke their array,
not overrunning the line in attack
nor taking on the first man come:
We meet, change lines; to the charge I return;
when they lock I rush, when they stand at bay
I dismount – the prize for one like me
when riders unsettled would fly the field
and in grim contortions the horses twist
as if poison they’d drunk at their masters’ hands.
If at times in straits I wake and walk,
wide rolls the range I seek beyond.
Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry, p. 115
The most evident feature of these lines is their fatalism. The theme of fated doom amongst the Arabs does not start with the Qur’an and the preaching of Islam, for it was already a pervasive feature of Jahili poetry. The Arabs resembled the old Norse warriors in their obsessive preoccupation with this theme. Also notable in 'Antara’s verses is their bombast. Pre-Islamic poets did not suffer from false modesty and boasting (fakhr) was one of the functions of poetry. Poets were heroic figures, masters of camel, horse and sword, and their verses were often recited by their tribes as the warriors rode out to battle. Sometimes indeed the battle did not take place, as the hostile tribes agreed instead to have their dispute settled by a poetry contest.
Jahili poetry was at one and the same time a public and a private poetry. It was public in that it was recited on public occasions such as battles and annual fairs. It was private in that the poet commemorated private griefs, solitary journeys and individual hand-to-hand combats. The solitary nature of Jahili poetry is especially evident in the compositions of the sa'alik poets. (Sa'alik means ‘one who follows the road’, i.e. a highwayman or vagabond. A subgroup, the futtak poets, were specialist killers.) The sa'alik poets were restless outlaws, who had been cast out from their tribes. They were fiercely independent, often misanthropic, and they produced bleak, misanthropic odes about violence and hardship.
AL-SHANFARA AL-AZDI was one of the most notorious of the sa'alik. (Shanfara means ‘the man with thick lips’.) The little that is known about him has a legendary feel to it, and some of it is contradictory. He was born towards the end of the fifth century and died c. 540. His tribe, the Azd, roamed the region of the southern Hejaz and northern Yemen. According to one version of the story, he was kidnapped as a child, but subsequently ransomed by the Salaman tribe. Having been turned down by a girl of the Banu Salaman, he turned against his foster tribe and vowed vengeance on them. In fulfilment of this vow, he killed a hundred of their number. Shanfara was described by Ta’abbata Sharran as
Bare of flesh in the shins, his arms backed with sinews strong, he
plunges into the blackest of night under torrents of rain;
the bearers of banners he, chosen for council he, a sayer of words
strong and sound, a pusher to the furthest bounds.
Lyall, The Mufadalliyat, p. 4
His most famous poem (and one of the oldest Arab poems of any length to have survived) is the Lamiyyat, so called because this qasida rhymes in lam, the letter T. Its sixty-eight verses evoke the poet’s lonely exile in the desert and his indifference to hunger, thirst and danger. It is a poem of boast (fakhr). The qasida is unusual, though certainly not unique, in omitting the opening nasib. The sa'alik poets had little time for sentiment and nostalgic yearnings. Shanfara is the poet as thug.
Sons of my mother, get your camels up!
For I choose other company than you.
Go! You have all you need: the moon is out,
The mounts are girthed to go, the saddles too.
The world will keep a good man safe from harm,
And give him sanctuary from ill-will.
Yes, by your life! The world has room for one
Who seeks or flees by night, and uses skill.
I have some nearer kin than you: swift wolf,
Smooth-coated leopard, jackal with long hair.
With them, entrusted secrets are not told;
Thieves are not shunned, whatever they may dare.
They are all proud and brave, but when we see
The day’s first quarry, I am braver then.
When hands go out for food, I am not first:
The first one is the greediest of men.
That is how much I condescend to them;
The better man is he who condescends.
If I lose one who pays no favors back,
And in whose friendship is no charm, three friends
Make up for that one: a courageous heart,
A bare blade, and a long and yellow bow
Of polished back, that twangs, whose excellence
Thongs hung upon it and a baldric show,
That groans when arrows leave it, like a wife
Who cries and wails, her son and husband dead.
I am not thirsty, pasturing at night
A herd with teats untied but young ill-fed,
No coward, timid, staying with his wife,
Who asks her how he ought to play his part,
No fearful ostrich, just as if a lark
Were flying up and down inside his heart,
No lazy stay-at-home and flirt, who goes
Mascaraed and perfumed by day and night,
No tick, to whom there comes more bad than good,
Defenceless, weak, roused only by his fright,
Nor am I scared by shadows, when the wilds
Loom trackless in the fearful traveler’s way,
For, when hard flint-stone meets my calloused feet,
Up from it sparks of fire and splinters spray.
I always put off hunger, till it dies;
I keep my mind far from it and forget.
I eat the dust, lest some do-gooder think
That for a favor I am in his debt.
Were I not fleeing blame, the only drink
And food for living well would be with me;
But this proud soul of mine gives me no peace
If it is blamed, until the time I flee.
I bind my bowels upon my hunger, as
A weaver’s taut and twisted threads are bound.
I breakfast poorly, like a lean gray wolf,
Whom deserts make to wander round and round.
He, hungry, reeling, fights the wind till noon;
He pounces near the ends of clefts and runs.
When food escapes him where he looks for it,
He howls; his comrades answer, hungry ones,
Thin-bellied, gray of face, like arrow-shafts
For play, that by a gambler’s hands are cast,
Or flushed-out bees, whose hive is hit by poles
A climbing honey-gatherer makes fast.
They, gaping, wide-mouthed, look as if their jaws
Were all stick-splinters, as they scowl and bite.
He howls, and they howl in the desert, like
Mourners, bereaved of sons, upon a height.
He ceases; they cease. He holds; so do they.
They all console each other, all hard-pressed.
He grieves, and they grieve; he stops, and they stop;
For patience, if grief does no good, is best.
He goes, and they go, hurrying, and each
Is brave, despite his
pain from what he hides.
The drab grouse drink my leavings, after they
Have travelled through the night with rumbling sides.
I run, and they run, racing, and they lag;
Their leader (I am he) goes on with ease.
I turn from them; they fall at the well’s rim,
And up to it their beaks and gullets squeeze.
Their noise around it, on both sides, is like
A group of camping travelers of clans.
From every side they gather at it, as
A pool draws camels from their caravans.
They gulp some water, then go on, just as,
At dawn, Uhazah riders speed away.
If war, Dust’s mother, sighs for Shanfara,
The time was long she had him for her prey.
The sport of wrongs that cast lots for his flesh,
His carcass, to whichever won, went first.
They slept when he slept, but with open eyes;
They quickly worked their way to do their worst.
He lives with cares that still keep coming back,
Severe as quartan fever, or more so.
I shoo them when they come, but they return;
They reach me from above and close below.
I know the earth’s face well, for I bed there
Upon a back raised by dry vertebrae.
I lean upon a bony arm, whose joints
Stand up, like dice a gamester threw at play.
Thus, though you see me, like the snake, Sand’s child,
Sun-blistered, ill-clad, sore, and shoeless, still
I have endurance, and I wear its shirt
Upon a sand-cat’s heart, with shoes of will.
And I am sometimes poor, yet I am rich:
The exile has true wealth, for he is free.
I do not show myself distressed by want,
Or proud and haughty in prosperity.
No follies rule my reason. Do you see
Me gossiping and lying? You do not.
One baleful night, the bowman burns for warmth
His bow and shafts, with which he would have shot.
I go in dark and drizzle, and my friends
Are hunger, shivers, shuddering, and fright.
I widow wives and orphan children, then
