From an Apulian pelike in the style of the Underworld Painter
(ca. 330-310 BCE), Metropolitan Museum of Art (06.1021.228).
tr. by David Larsen at 7:37 PM
Labels: Arabic prose
Al-Ḍabu‘ is the female; the male is called al-ḍib‘ān and al-dhaykh. Among its other names are:
Haḍājir "Whose Gut Is Huge"
Jay’al "The Female Hulk"
Ja‘āri "Craps-a-Lot"
Qasāmi "Divider-up [of Carcasses]"
Naqāthi "Bone-Sucker," from its [habit of] extracting marrow from
bones, as in the anonymous rajaz verse:
Jā’at Naqāthi taḥmilu 'l-birdhawnā
"Along came Bone-sucker, carrying [part of?] an old horse..."
al-‘Arfā’, for the length of its ‘urf [which is its mane]
al-‘Athwā’ "The Bearded Lady," for the denseness of its hair
al-‘Arjā’ "Whose Gait is Limping"
al-Khāmi‘a "Whose Gait is Loping"
Umm Hinbir "Mother of the Flesh-Tearer"
Umm Khannūr "Mother of the Anus," also Umm Khunnūr
The hyena pup is called fur‘ul. The hyena's den is a wijār.
The offspring of hyena and the wolf is called al-Sim‘ "The Sharp-Eared" (?) and Abū Sabara "Father to the Wound-Prober." Dissenting opinion holds that the sim‘ is a cross between wolf and dog, and that the offspring of wolf and hyena is called al-‘Usbūr.
From The Rudiments of Lexicography by al-Khaṭīb al-Iskāfī
tr. by David Larsen at 7:19 PM
Labels: Arabic lexicography
tr. by David Larsen at 10:32 PM
Labels: Greek poetry , Lost works
The poet Abu 'l-Bakhtarī said: The tales I used to hear of Abū Fahma, a madman of Baghdad with a gift for poetic improvisation, led me to seek him out. Our meeting came about in a lane of the city, where I said to him, "How are you today, Abū Fahma?" He replied in verse:
I have reached the edge of my precipice. Through you
the way lies open to the wellsprings of my ruin.
I see you turning, but not toward me.
Whose heart is least corrupt you least attend.
O you whose estrangement prolongs my pining:
may you be struck with pining worse than mine!
Abu 'l-Bakhtarī said: At this, I withdrew a bouquet of narcissus from my sleeve, and pressed it on him with my wishes that God prolong his life. He stood smelling them for a time, then delivered these verses:
On my wedding day, there came from the South hard-spattering,
black and brilliant [clouds] wreathed with rain.
Then kicked in the East Wind with its fecundating showers,
and the curtailment of our nuptials was hard to bear.
Our babe was born still. Labor pains came on,
and there was parturition, and that was the issue.
Springtime wove a shroud, and as one hand
the dew and breeze gave color to its fabric.
It was this flower's composite yellow, white petals
cupping ornaments of unsmithed gold
on emerald columns raised aloft with the morning,
like unto the sun in eye-like splendor.
Al-Hasan ibn Hāni' [better known as Abū Nuwās] said: I paid a call on Mānī al-Muwaswas, who delivered these verses:
A live man's poem is uttered to you by a dead man.
Stuck between death and life, he stands [right here].
Vicissitudes have whittled his frame, and at his end
he stays in hiding from the rest of creation.
To look me over, inspecting my persona,
is to find not one iota of my former charm.
I then went on [continued Abū Nuwās] until I met Ju'ayfirān al-Muwaswas, an elder of the Banū Hāshim with a speech impediment. Around his neck he wore a golden collar with a silver chain. He asked me, "Where did you crawl out of, Hasan?" "Mānī's house," I answered. "Here's one for Mānī's mother," he said and, calling for pen and paper, told me to write this down:
Under cover of the night, the rooster makes no sound
- except on nights I strive along the pathway to your door.
Not every eyeful leads the peeper to delight!
At night, the joys of bed-rest are what's best,
- except on nights I mount the dark,
desiring you. Braving a pair of linked shackles,
I am playing with my life when I come to you. 'Sweet Hope!'
I am calling out, amid the night's black suit,
to the stoker of the flames licking [this] wretch's heart,
taking no care for his welfare nor his reputation.
For treachery and fickleness your nature is unsurpassed
by all the djinn and mortal men living put together now.
With that [continued Abū Nuwās], he told me to tear up what I had from Mānī, which I did.
I went on until I encountered ‘Adrad the Afflicted. Ringed by a crowd of boys, he was slapping his face and weeping as he wailed aloud, "O people! Bitter is the taste of separation!" So I asked him, "Abū Muhammad [which was ‘Adrad's byname], where are you coming from?" "Seeing off the pilgrims bound for Mecca," he said. "What makes it so hard to bear?" I asked. "Some of my kinsmen travel with them," he said. "Did you deliver a poem on the occasion?" I asked. He responded that he had done so, and recited:
They departed Thursday morning, and I bid them farewell
when, taking up their burdens, they took their leave.
As they turned to go, my soul turned with them.
'Come back!' I said. 'Come back to where?' said she.
To a rattling skeleton empty of blood,
and bare of flesh but for a pair of eyes
washed by grief, and the shell of an ear
defiant in its deafness to all blame."
Continued from The Necklace Without Peer of Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih
For the conclusion to Madmen Who Were Poets, see the (St. Mark's) Poetry Project Newsletter no. 250 (Feb/March 2017), 8-12, where the whole of Ibn Abd Rabbihi's chapter appears with an introduction by the translator. Many thanks to Betsy Fagin
tr. by David Larsen at 1:29 AM
Labels: Arabic poetry
tr. by David Larsen at 2:34 AM
Labels: Greek prose
Abu 'l-‘Abbās [al-Mubarrad] attributes these verses to al-Mānī al-Muwaswas:
The cheeks on him are white and red:
red in their middles and white at the rim.
Thin but dewy, like a cup's glass walls
streaked by swirling wine within.
Al-Mubarrad also said: Once, I got caught in a rainstorm, which quickly abated, and along came Mānī al-Muwaswas, saying:
Don't mistake for real rain
the rain that fell just now.
A single tear from my eye
flows more copiously, when
assailed by the gloom
of my worried thoughts.
This is what it's like to watch
the change of heart inside a friend's bosom.
Mānī al-Muwaswas went up to Abū Dulaf [al-'Ijlī] and said:
The look in your eye 'mid the enemy host
saves you the trouble of taking out swords.
"By God!" said Abū Dulaf, "no poet has ever praised me so well," and ordered ten thousand dirhams be given to him. But Mānī declined to take them. "It's all the same to me as half a dirham's worth of harisa," he said.
Also by Mānī al-Muwaswas:
Grazing on hearts, some gazelles are intent
on necklaces. But in my heart there is just grass.
My life is forfeit to gazelles. Instead of antlers
they are rubied and empearled with bangles of gold.
O beauty who stole mine eye unwittingly,
seldom though the stolen glance unwitting be!
The beauty of her eyes elicited my heart from me,
and I gave it over, little heeding its worth.
If they do not look my way, the attraction's finished.
What good are eyes to me if she declines?
A thief and his hand are soon separated,
but hearts are for stealing at no such penalty.
‘Alī ibn al-Jahm rode up on a man in the grip of a brain-fever who was encircled by a hostile crowd. On spotting him, the man took hold of his horse's bridle and said:
Do not join the company of
wastrels before me. I swear by the prerogative
of the One Who aggrieves my life with them,
and the One Whose forgiveness I beg for them:
compared to the fallen of their own number,
these are fallen further still.
His rolling gaze then fixed on a shapely boy with a handsome face, and he rent his tunic, saying:
"And this one, their most nobly favored,
now treats me with surpassing baseness!
From The Necklace Without Peer of Ibn 'Abd Rabbih (continued)
tr. by David Larsen at 1:44 PM
Labels: Arabic poetry
Whatever myth of origins you believe, the world's first man was surely naked and unclothed when his Potter threw him, before his untimely and unlicensed grab at [the fruit of the Tree of] Knowledge. But enough of esoteric lore. Let's have one of yours instead - the Egyptian tale set down by Alexander for his mother to read about the age of Osiris, back when Ammon, rich in sheep, came out of Libya. It was in their company, the Egyptians declare, that Mercury chanced to brush his hand over a ram, and was so pleased by its softness that he separated a sheep from its fleece. The material's pliancy moved him to keep working it, and at his continued pinching a thread streamed forth. This he wove using a technique he had practiced on strips of linden-bark. Meanwhile, you give credit to Minerva for all wool-craft and construction of looms, even though the work at Arachne's shop was better done.
Tertullian, On the philosopher's cloak III.4-5
tr. by David Larsen at 11:00 PM
Labels: Fiber arts , Latin prose
The grammarian Muhammad ibn Yazīd al-Mubarrad said: En route to Wāsit from Baghdad, we took a detour to the Monastery of Ezekiel [at al-Nu'māniyya] to see the madmen there. Their madnesses were all of kinds known to us, or so we thought until we spied a well-kept youth in laundered clothes sitting apart from the others. "If any," we said, "then this one." So we approached him with a pious greeting, which he did not return. "What's the matter with you?" we asked him. He said:
God knows how sad I am.
To none other can it be described.
My soul is two, one in this land
while another land keeps the other.
The one stuck here can endure no more.
The hide around it is about to give out.
I believe the other soul to be in the same state.
By my troth, hers is the present soul's matter.
"Well done, by God!" I said to him. At this, he flailed as if throwing something at us, saying, "Who says 'Well done' to the likes of me?"
Al-Mubarrad said: We were making haste to get away from him, when the young man said, "Come back, by God, I beseech you, until I recite for you another poem. Then you can say whether it's well or poorly done." So we went back to him and said, "Recite." He began:
Just before dawn, when the palomino camels were knelt
for their saddles and a shapely cargo to trudge away with,
when, face to face through a gap in the curtain [of her howdah]
she looked out at me through eyes engorged with tears,
at the wave of her hand [henna-stanched] like a bough of ‘anam,
I called out to the camel, 'Let your hind legs not bear [her] away!'
I wail for the split that undid what she and I had,
the split that came down, that undoing split when they moved off.
Palomino driver! Stay their steps, that we may lengthen our farewell.
Palomino driver! Your haste speeds my ending.
Never to renounce my desire to be with them, for the rest of my life,
I wish I knew: what did they with the rest of theirs?
We said to him, "They must have died." At this, he cried out, "Then I, by God, die also!" and fell to all fours, stretched out and died. And we did not leave the place until we had seen to his burial.
[A shorter variant of the same report.] Al-Mubarrad said: On entering the Monastery of Ezekiel, we were met by a madman with a rock in his hand. "O assembly of my brethren, harken unto me!" he said as the people scattered. Then he began to recite:
Many's the soul of an eminent man
reduced to moaning without remit,
who wheels to face the host in battle
but shrinks from single combat.
From The Necklace Without Peer of Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi (continued)
Recounted also in the Thousand and One Nights, the Meadows of Gold of al-Mas‘ūdī, the Letting People Know of al-Itlīdī, et alibi.
tr. by David Larsen at 4:44 PM
Labels: Arabic poetry
Abu 'l-Wāsi‘ [a companion of the poet Abū ‘Īsā Sālih al-Rashīd] was in the company of his sons when a poet of the madmen called and asked permission to perform an ode. Abu 'l-Wāsi‘ declined, but the poet importuned until his resistance fell. After the final verse:
Irrefutable man, on this day you are their head,
and around you the cream of your eminent sons!
Abu 'l-Wāsi‘ said to him: "If you would only leave us en masse" (lit. "head by head").
It is said that a mad poet of the Bedouin visited Nasr ibn Sayyār and declaimed a poem composed of one hundred amatory verses and only two lines of praise. "By God," said Nasr to him, "the words of your poem are as graceless as their meaning. All your effort was spent on amatory prelude, with nothing left over for panegyric!" The poet said, "I can fix that." So he came back the next morning with a poem that began:
Can you make out the house of Umm al-Ghamr?
—Leave that! and let's have a poem in praise of Nasr.
"Neither one of these [is any good]," said Nasr.
One of the scholars said: "For sheer hermeneutic depravity, the only thing I have heard to rival the Rāfida was something a madman of Mecca said about a poem [by al-Farazdaq]. This man said, 'The Banū Tamīm are the biggest liars I have ever heard. In the poem:
[He Who hung the sky has built for us
a house whose columns soar above all others.
The house the Sovereign built is ours, and what
Heaven's Arbitrator builds cannot be shaken.]
The house in whose courtyard Zurāra sits arrayed,
and Mujāshi‘ and Nahshal, father to horsemen...
The Banū Tamīm claim these names belong to their own!' " [As is the case, Mujāshi‘ and Nahshal being direct ancestors of the poet himself.]
The scholar said: "I asked him, 'In your view, what do they mean?' He said, 'The "house" is the house of God, and Zurāra is the stone that is "buttoned" [zurrirat] around it. Mujāshi‘ is the well of Zamzam, whose water is "coveted" [jushi‘at], and "Father to Horsemen" is the mountain of Abū Qubays in Mecca.' I said to him, 'And Nahshal?' For a whole hour he thought it over, then said, 'It is the tall black lampstand of the Ka‘ba. That is what Nahshal is.' "
From The Necklace Without Peer of Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih (continued)
tr. by David Larsen at 12:54 AM
Labels: Arabic poetry