Although fragments of Arabic literature are known as early as the 6th century CE, scholars are unaware of significant poetry having been penned in Arabic prior to the 8th century. This is because Arabic does not appear to have been extensively used as a written language prior to the compilation of the Qur'an in the 7th century (i.e., while poetry may have been a large part of Arabic culture prior to that period, there are no known manuscript sources which reliably validate this).
Two important compilations of poetry survive from the pre-Islamic period of Arabic literature. One is called the Mu'allaqāt (usually translated as The Hanging Poems or The Suspended Odes, since tradition holds that these poems once were hung in, or from, the Kaaba in Mecca, though most scholars believe this to have been very unlikely). The other is known as the Mufaddaliyat.
Purportedly compiled by 8th century Arab scholar Hammad Ar-Rawiya, the Mu'allaqāt (a snippet of which appeared in yesterday's post) consists of seven long poems by seven different poets. To fully appreciate these poems, one must appreciate both the context of their composition (within a Bedouin culture characterized by strong tribal kinship) and the means of their transmission (centuries of oral transmission inevitably introducing varying degrees of mutilation -- rearrangements and/or omission of verses, the piecing together of unrelated verses into a contiguous whole, etc.) This sort of critical understanding has long been required of other great works of world literature that also are the product of oral traditions (e.g., the works attributed to Homer).
Although the first English-language translation of the Mu'allaqāt was that undertaken by Sir William Jones in 1782, the best known English-language translation probably is that found in the 2 volumes of Ancient Arabian Poetry authored by Sir Charles James Lyall (1885, 1894):
A recent commentary on these poems by Pierre Joris notes that all attempts at English translation inevitably fail to convey the real beauty of these poems, because the monorhyme scheme & the complex meters are impossible in English, [and] even more troublesome is the high rhetoric structure, something so alien to contemporary American poetry & voice as to be inadmissible. In fact all translations that try to reproduce it sound like bad late Victorian or Tennysonian orientalism. Which does not, of course, keep Joris from attempting his own translation, this snippet coming from The Ode of Tarafa:
I wouldn't give a damn
to know the hour of my death
if it weren't for these three:
first -- & quit bugging me about it --
the pleasure of an old wine that foams
as soon as you add water
then there is the call from someone in need:
I come running, hunched over,
a tamarisk wolf sensing water
& last but not least the joy in shortening a cloudy day
laying a well-fleshed lady
under a firmly pitched tent.
I have spent my life generously drinking
at its source . If death should come tomorrow
whose throat would be parched?
The Mufaddaliyat is an anthology purportedly compiled by Al-Mufaddal ibn Muhammad ibn Ya'lah between 762-784 CE. It traditionally contains 126 poems by 67 authors (the earliest dating to ca. 500 CE). Much of what modern scholars know about pre-Islamic Arab life can be traced to the magnificent diversity of this collection.
Best known to Western readers from Lyall's 1918-1924 3-volume translation (currently available as a print-on-demand reprint), recent translations by scholars like Michael Sells (in Literary Heritage of Classical Islam: Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of James A. Bellamy) are making this remarkable anthology accessible to a modern audience:
Graceful as a rush of papyrus,
beauty comes to her
before others,
and she grows into it early.
She reveals to you
a delicate face
paper smooth,
glowing
Like the pearl of pearls
distant Persians use
to light up the throne-hall
of a sultan,
Purchased at great price,
retrieved by a diver,
bone-thin,
like an arrow.
Tomorrow, the evolution of Arabic poetry....
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