I'm intrigued to discover how much of al-Safadi's Tadhkira (Memoranda) is still extant, including parts 27–30 which are currently for sale, separately bound in morocco leather (except for part 27 which is incomplete and appears to be loose). Hopefully, the buyer won't disappear with them, but make them available to the public. Somewhere there is someone who needs this manuscript more than Gollum needs the ring, and would do wonderful things with what they find there. And they don't have €144,200 to blow. I know this because with regard to part 23 I am that someone. Let me explain.
Last page of part 27 of al-Safadi's Tadhkira, courtesy INLIBRIS
Taqi al-Din ‘Ali ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Jabir was a poet of Baghdad known as Ibn al-Maghribi. He died in his forties in the year 1285, so at the time the Mongols took over he was in his teens. He was what they call a "secretary poet," that is a civil servant who wrote poetry on the side, as opposed to a "court poet" whose whole entire job was poetry. But his work was much esteemed, and was published in one volume by his friend Qawam al-Din Turki, probably after the poet's death. I have no hope that this volume will ever be recovered.
What's left of Ibn al-Maghribi's poetry is preserved in biographical dictionaries. There are fewer than a dozen poems and (with two panegyric exceptions) they are all bangers. I've done several of them (1, 2, 3) and am committed to translating them all, but if someone else jumps in I won't mind because they're obscenely difficult.
They're also kind of obscene. His poetic specialty was mujun "drollery" and khala‘a "boasting about stuff that can get you in serious trouble." These aren't genres, exactly, but modes, of prose as well as poetry, which brings me to the favor I am asking.
Ibn al-Maghribi is credited with a prosimetrum treatise called "The Epistle of the Two Luminaries," which is how I'm translating Risalat al-Nayyirayn for the time being. It seems to be about a love triangle. The "luminaries" are the sun and moon. Ibn Abi Hajala quotes two bits from it in Diwan al-Sababa, and you can read them here.
It pains me to report that Risalat al-Nayyirayn is listed on the title page of Universität Tübingen Ma VI 70, and must have been contained in the forty pages now missing from that manuscript. The only other trace of it to surface is in al-Safadi's biographical entry for the poet: "Ibn al-Maghribi also has an epistle known as 'The Two Luminaries,' written in the style of Ibn al-Wahrani—an excellent treatise which I copied into part 23 of my Tadhkira."
Title page of part 28 of al-Safadi's Tadhkira, courtesy INLIBRIS
Other parts of the Tadhkira are out there. Part 14 is prized for its selection of Ibn Daniyal's poems and has been published. Chester Beatty MS 3861 contains it, together with parts 24–26, and hipsters know where to find the microfilm. I found one unnumbered part at the National Library of Iran without trying. Karabulut shows parts of it in Cairo and Istanbul, Brockelmann has them at the Bodleian, the Escurial, the British Library, the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, some God-forsaken "Ind. Off." and at this point my impatience has summated.
I don't know if manuscript research seems fun or glamorous but it's not. You spend most of your time looking at screens. There is no limit to the amount of time I could lose to the search if it became my project, and so I am going public with this rant of a plea, or "crowd sourcing" it, if you will. If you or someone you know is sitting on part 23 of al-Safadi's Tadhkira, please reveal it. I don't need to be the one who locates it, but I do need to edit and translate Risalat al-Nayyirayn. I know how entitled this sounds, but Ibn al-Maghribi and I are way past that. Send the manuscript to my work email, or writing dot gathering dot field at gmail dot com, and doubly you will be on the right side of literary history, helping out two mujun poets at the same time.
