August 22, 2020

Origins of the fold-in

On the poet Abu 'l-‘Ibar al-Hashimi (d. 866 CE), by Sinan Antoon,
The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Hajjaj
and Sukhf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 40:

The image is of printed text that reads: There are two other points of commonality that Ibn al-Hajjaj and Abu 'l-‘Ibar share, and these are the studied and deliberate inclusion of vulgar and colloquial registers into poetry and the desire to effect confusion into accepted norms. When asked about the sources of his <i>muhal</i> (absurdities) Abu 'l-‘Ibar said: 'I wake up early and sit on the bridge with paper and pen and write all that I hear from the speech of those who come and go, the boatmen and the watercarriers, until I fill both sides of the paper. Then I cut it in half and paste it the other way and get speech that is unparalleled in its folly.' 189  From the Book of Songs

tr. by David Larsen at 2:32 PM  

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