محمود
04-09-2006, 06:27 AM
The locatios of Muallaqat
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The ancient poetry of Arabia, immediately before the advent of Mohammed, is the most delightful wild flower of literature the Eastern world can show. Compared with it, all other Asiatic verse has certain garden character, the bravery of the cultured rose and jessa- mine and lily. But this has the fugitive beauty of the lily of the field, nay, of something wilder still, the flower of no field at all but of the naked desert, which after the spring rain is clothed for an instant with diminutive strange blossoms peculiar to itself and which are seen no more. All that it can be likened to with any justice is the lyrical por-tion of the older Hebrew scriptures-parts of the Book of job, the Psalms of David without their piety, the love-canticle of Solomon without its mystic meaning. In Europe the nearest analogy to it is perhaps to be found in the pre-Christian verse of Celtic Ireland, which by a strange accident was its close contemporary, and lost its wild natural impulse through the very same circumstance of the conversion of its pagan bards to an overmastering new theology.
Of its quite early history we know nothing except that it would seem to have been an indigenous product of the Arabian soil, not un- connected with the primaeval civilization of Yemen, and that it had asquired a new importance through the historical dispersion of the Yemenite clans in the second century of the Christian era and the founding of the two Arabian kingdoms of the north, Ghassan and Hira. At the time when the earliest poems of which we have any record were composed, that is to say, some three centuries later, the whole of the Peninsula was in the occupation of more of less kindred pastoral communities, following the same customs, speaking the same language, and bound by the same code of honour in peace and war.
Each tribal section had its own dira, or pasturing district, beyond whose limits its flocks and herds did not wander, nor the tents of its women. The chief men, however, of whatever clan, were not thus to be con-fined, and, besides the raids of many hundred miles they made in wartime, traveled far afield in time of peace, and, wherever there was no blood feud, passed from tribe to tribe to tribe, enjoying hospitality, seeking adventures, and reciting, with what talent they had, their verses. As such singers and warriors became known and their fame spread abroad, there sprang up a competiti on among the tribe sheikhs to receive them, and especially the Arab kings of Hira and Ghassan liked to attract them to their courts. It gave these princes an intellectual amusement to be thus surrounded, flattered their vanity and enlarged their influence. It was through the medium of the two rival Courts of the north that the the poets of Arabia got indirectly their knowledge of the world outside. The prince of Hira was tributary to the kesra (Chrosroes) of Persia, and the prince of Ghassan was tributary in like manner to the kaisar (Caesar) of Byza Rome. Faint echoes of the resplendent imperial names are to be heard in the Arabian poetry, but they are echoes only, coming from afar and received at second hand.
It is not difficult for any one who has traveled in modern Nejd to form to himself a picture of what these princely courts them were.
They cannot have differed much from those of the Ibn Saouds and the Ibn Rashids of to-day. The Prince, half Bedouin half townsman, was in his desert quality still sbeykh of his own noble tribe enriched by his bounties. In the city where he had built himself a fortress, he was hakim, its lord and king. He took his tax of the settled population of the desert edge through the fedawin, his Arab guard of foot-soldiers. The winter months of cold and the extreme heats of summer saw him delivering months of cold and in his castle; the spring and outumn saw him in his tents, or on horseback making foray on his enemies. The Arab strangers came and went, were enter- tained and departed as they would, some singing his praises for largess received, others in dudgeon because neglected. All alike defiant of outhority in act and word.
They were hawks of too wild a plumage to be reclaimed by threats of cajoleries into permanent service. Thus at the present day one finds, even now in England-ridden Egypt, certain Bedouins from Central Arabia, waifs from the noble tribes of Muteyr and Harb and Ateybeh, always clustered in semi-service round the khedivial court at koubba. Here and there among them may be discovered a poet, here and there a rebab player; all are horsemen. They come and serve for a while as rakibin (riders) to mount and break the khedivial colts or the khedivial camels. They are ornamental appari-tions in their gay dresses and equipments, are good horse-masters and honest in their service. But manual labour they will not condescend to do, nor will they be drilled as soldiers, nor sleep in houses, nor wear uniforms. At the least huff they are away. They go forth from the palace outspoken in the Prince's blame or praise, nor will money tempt them back nor the thought of fear or favour.
In their own land the poets of the Ignorance, for such is the name given them by Islamic writers, were sometimes themselves princes or of princely family. They were at least free gentlemen of blood and lineage, undedased by toil and ignoring the "dignity of labour."
They were warriors and knights errant, the heroes of their own romances prompt with sword and spear, horsemen and camel-riders, tent-dwell-ers from their childhood and inured to physical hardships of all kinds. Outdoor doers of wild deeds, these valorous desert song-masters were no mere decadents, the "idle singers of an empty day," but men determined to live every hour of their gay lives, to enjoy every joy within their reach to their pleasure's uttermost. Here we find nothing of the Ossianic gloom of our own archaic bards, nothing of the super stitious doubts and conscience-stricken terrors of mediaeval Europe in fear of things beyond the grave, nothing of the theological limitations of the later Moslem verse. All with them is frankly, inspiritingly, stupendously hedonistic.
The primitive Arabs, just as are still their true Bedouin descend- ants, were rank materialists. They believed in neither heaven nor hell, nor in any life beyond the one they were enjoying. Of religion they understood nothing but a vague monotheism, tempered with just enough idolatry to make oath by, but not enough to modify their lives. They were the least superstitious of mankind, the least influenced by fetish fears and hobgoblin terrors. It was their habit to be abroad at night or to sit round their camp-fires under the stats in mirth and song, and then to sleep by day, a mode of living which gave but little room for idle ghost fancies born of indoor ways and the dread of darkness. There was none of that fear of loneliness, that Awe of mountain solitudes that for thousands of years haunted the European mind, and made the snowfields of the Alps and the great pine forests of Germany the fearful home of fabulous powers and shapes to be avoided. It is the townsman in the East, the dweller in houses of stone and brick, that trembles at the thought of the jinns, not he whose dwelling is the "house of hair." The Bedouin knows his deserts far too well to be dream that they are unnaturally in- habited. The noises he hears in the darkness he reads the next morn-ing as in a book, explained by the tracks left by the night prowler in the sand. There is no sound, no voic in all the desert that he does not recognize as one familiar from his childhood, and always to be accounted for by natural causes. Why then should he be afraid? The absence of the supernatural is the distinguishing feature, as con-trasted with all other primitive poetries, of the poetry of the Arabian Ignorance.
In morals, the pre-Islamic Arabs, in spite of certain lapses, stood notably higher than any of their neighbours in Asia. It must be remembered, however, that their rule of conduct was based upon no religious sanction, but avowedly on personal and tribal honour, that is to say, on traditional opinion. The Virtues they adored were courage, generosity, lavish hospitality, the protection of the weak and of all who came to them as suppliants, a readiness to succour a friend and revenge a wrong, a prompt self-sacrifice for the tribe's sake in peace or war. Their courage was of a different quality, perhaps, from that admired among ourselves. It was the valour of a nervous, excitable people who required encouragement from onlookers and from their own voices to do their best, defiance before the battle, immoderate boasting afterwards. It needed not seldom the taunts of their women to make them face their foes of stop their flight. It is still the custom in cases of warfare of a serious kind in Arabia for the tribe to take its womenfolk with it on a campaign, as obliging even the laggards to fight manfully, and they have a girl accompanying them mounted on a camel who sings and shouts to them during the combat. Thus worked upon, the tribesmen fear neither death nor wounds, and become heroic. So, too, with their generosity, there is always in it an element of vainglory which finds strengthening in the presence of friends. A great sheikh, even if he is secretly parsimonious, will give prodigally in public out of regard for his neighbours' eyes, for the fame of an open hand gains many adherents. The motive is per-haps not a high one, yet it is a wholesome in any society that to give should be counted of more glory than to keep, and with some among them the freehandedness is very real. The true master-ing virtue, however, of Arabia is its hospitality. There, it would be a shame for the poorest and meanest to refuse a stranger, nor would any, though he were alone, turn such away from his tent-door. Con-science would step in and prevent so great a failure of honour. Another-matter of conscience is the blood revenge. This in a noble Arabian mind becomes a passionate prompting, almost a physical necessity, which if it be not obeyed will deprive its subject of sleep, of appetite, of health, and leave him a miserable man. On the same footing, in a minor degree, stand the duties of succouring the weak and protecting suppliants who have thrown themselves beneath the protector's cloak, even should he be an enemy. In all these instances a well-born Arab will act on principles which it would be idle not to recognize as moral, yet wich are neither held as binding by Moslems in general, nor are practiced with fidelity any where else in western Asia but only in Arabia.
Towards women, the Arabs of the Ignorance were at the same time devoted and practical. The girls and matrons of the tribe were no salves or chattels, as in primitive Europe, but essentially free-born women with their right of choice before marriage, and of leaving the domestic hearth, if dissatisfied, after marriage. They were made much of the women in most other lands of the pagan East, but also than those of contemporary Christendom. Many of them were as courage-ous and as well educated, if the word can be used of a people who none of them could read or write, as their husbands or their lovers.
The Arabs, therefore had in their womenkind the material of a high romance, and they built on it the whole scheme of chivalry which we are accustomed to consider an exclusively Christian condition of things, but which in fact mediaeval Europe imitated and developed on lines of its own from the original Arab model, brought through Africa into Spain. Knight-errantry, the riding forth on horseback in search of adventures, the rescue of captive maidens, the succour rendered everywhere to women in adversity, all these were essentially Arabian ideas, as was the very name of chivalry, the connection of honourable conduct with the horse-rider, the man of noble blood, the cavalier. Genealogy, the pride of lineage, the belief in the quality of blood ancestrally inherited as something superior either to riches or to blood ancestrally inherited as something superior either to riches or to any other accidental advantage, and conferring on its owner moral characteristics impossible of acquisition by the vulgar, were no less essentially Arabian and, if found at all elsewhere than among the Arabs, were nowhere so intensely believed in. Devotion to a woman nobly born, of their own noble race and people, is the theme their poets love to dwell on, and always stands foremost in their scheme of romance. It is the keynote initially struck of every poem of the Moallakat. At the same time there is this difference between the devotion of the Arabian lover and that of his imitator in Europe, that the Christian idea of continence as a special virtue does not enter at all into the Arab conception of love; the Bedouin troubadours liked wholly to enjoy their loves. And so too in their rhymes; the cruel and disdainful damsel finds little place in pre-Islamic verse, rather she who has been kind and whom adverse fate has torn away. It is almost always the woman loved and lost that is mourned by them with the most passionate longing, for whom they perform their most glorious deeds, and whom they celebrate in their most enduring songs, the recollection of a short connubial season spent in the enormous solitude of the desert in some shut valley of the desolate hills green for those few sweet weeks of spring and love, then and left un- beautiful for ever.
There is no part of the earth's surface where love exists under such strenuous and endearing conditions as the Arabian desert, where the souls of man and women are knit so closely by the immense isolation of their lives, where either becomes so dependent on the other by the constant pressure of material dangers. Each little beyt shaar, 'house of hair,' is as a fortress in the wilderness, set up alone in some far valley against the forces of Nature and held there by its dual garrison. In the open plain with its wild, parsimonious beauty, every bush and stone, every beetle lizard, every rare track of jerboa, gazelle or ostrich on the sand, become of value and is remembered, it may be years after-wards, while the stones of the camp-fires stand black and deserted in testimony of the brief season of love. It is only at the time of the rahla or general moving of the camp that the tribe comes together, the men leading their flocks and herds. And the women seated, each family in its bowdaj or curtained panier, on its tallest camel, and sing-ing as they go. It is always a brilliant spectacle, and one that lives in memory, as the converging lines wind up the valleys at sunrise and over the crests of the hills to their new pastures. This is what Zoheyr so beautifully sings in his poem of the Moallakat. His Om-Aufa is the woman he has loved, who has borne him a son, and who is gone. She has left him of her own free will, perhaps by his own fault, perhaps by cruel circumstance, but he shall see her no more. Bedouin romance reaches no higher point than this. The love does not touch him which has been loved in vain. And in truth, love of this sweet domestic kind is not the sole though it is always the lead-ing theme of these wild singers. Mere passion, for pleasure and adventure's sake, is referred to often, and not seldom in boasting terms of favours recived or won. The reader of the Moallakat must not expect to find in them the refinements of our drawing-room soul- wooers. Neither are the loves of angels in them nor the loves of boys.
Love, however, of any kind, material or ideal, never filled the whole range of vision of the Bedouin singer. More important in his mind are always his dealings with men, and to these he returns as a duty from his excursions in the kingdom of romance. If he boasts occa-sionally of his the battlefield, in the council tent, as an entertainer of guests, and even, to his shame, as a wine-biber. The drinking of wine was considered in pre-Islamic Arabia the test of a generous fancy, and it was no discredit for a young noble to waste his substance in treating his companions to skin of the resin-cured juice of the grape, put up to auction at the wine-seller's even until all was gone. This, with their love of gambling, is the change in manners we find between the ancient Arabia of the Moallakat and the modern Arabia where wine and games of chance wholly unknown. Moral blemishes not a few there are in all the poems, but one would not wish them absent, for they serve to point the reality of the life described. An astonishingly vivid realism is indeed their chief characteristic, and we may well forgive these roistering singers when they tell us of their lapses in view of the splendid pictures they given us of the sights and sounds and natural wonders of the desert with which they were all familiar. Not even in the Book of job do we find nobler presentments of four- foot life than in the Moallakat. The horse, the camel, the an-telope, the wolf, these are over and over again depicted, the wild ass and that most wonderful of created things, the ostrich with its brood. What would we not give for pictures of this naturalistic value in our own ancient poets of the wild ox of Europe, the elk, the beaver and the bear? It was with these living wild creatures that the poets of the Ignorance lived, and it was these that they described, these and the storms which occasionally wrecked their valleys, blotting out in a night the memorial stones of their encampments so touchingly re- membered; the sun's heat in their long day marches; the stars hung overhead at night like lamps from the firmament; the ships seen from their sea-coasts; and yet again their camels and their horses, for it was always to these that their thoughts returned, and which they did not weary of depicting or fear to weary their listeners with.
Such was Arabia in the first century before Islam, and such the nature of its poets. Of all that won distinction among them, the most noted were the seven authors of the Mudahabat, "The Golden Odes," known also as the Moallakat. The tradition with regard to these is that, at the annual fair held at Okad, in western Nejd, each poet recited a set piece of verse, Kasida, it being put to the popular vote to decide upon their merits; and that afterwards those poems which had been judged the best were set down in golden manuscript and hung up in the Kaaba at Mecca, and so received the name of the "Golden Odes" or "The Suspended Poems." It is, however, ex- tremely doubtful whether the whole of this story is true. All that is recorded in attestation of it by the early Islamic commentators is con- tained in a passage of the Kitab El Aghani, the work of the celebrated Abulfaraj of Ispahan, who, writing in the third century of the Hejra, states on authority he considered valid, that Amr ibn Kolthum's poem was recited both by himself and by men of his tribe at Okad and at Mecca. There is no word, however, in this narrative, of the poem having been reduced to writing, or of its having been hung up in the Kaaba or elsewhere; and what is far more probable is that the story is an attempt by later scholars to find a meaning for the rather obscure titles given to the poems, consonant with modern Mohammedan ideas. As has been well pointed out by Sir Charles Lyall in his exhaustive monograph on the subject, the art of writing was, if not unknown, at least very little practiced by the Pagan Arabs, while the allusion to the fine Egyptian linen and the letters of gold, is also somewhat suspicious, as suggesting an epoch when Arabian intercourse with Egypt was closer than in pre-Islamic days.
Be this, however, as it may, the "seven Golden Odes" or the "seven Suspended poems," have come to be considered the classic poems, and have obtained for their authors a special position as the most famous singers of Pagan Arabia. The date of the earliest of them, Imr el Kais, is reckoned to be about the year A.d. 545, and that of the latest, Zoheyr's, about A.D 605, OR within twenty years of the preaching of Islam.
It is a matter of dispute what was the precise effect of the new doctrine on the poetic impulse of Arabia. European writers are gener- ally of opinion that the revelation of the Koran checked, if it did not a once Kill, the wild natural growth of song in the Peninsula. They argue that all dogmatic religions, enthusiastically embraced, have a tendency to fill the whole field of passionate imagination to the ex- clusion of rival passions, and that Islam was fatal to Arabian poetry, justs as Christianity had been fatal to the poetry of Greece and Rome. It is certain that the pleasure-loving desert bards were, at least in their praise of lawless love. And wine, out of harmony with the austere thought of Islam. The Liberal school, however, of Mohammedan teaching altogether that either the prophet or his immediate successors were hostile to the poets. The two first Caliphs, Abu Bekr and Omar, are traditionally Known to have had the national bards in their in- timacy, and it was not till long after, say the 'Ulema, that Arabian poetry began to decline. They hold the verse composed under the Ommayyad Caliphs to be on a level with the best of pagan times.
Nevertheless, it is difficult not to recognize a decay in certain qualities of the later verse which if not due to Mohammedan teaching was at least the result of Islam's triumph in the world. Arabia, within a few years of the Prophet's death, had, like a pent-up flood, overflowed the neighbouring lands, and the outpouring had left the peninsula de-pleted of its most vigorous tribes. All that was best of them had passed outside the desert borders and had become city dwellers, in Syria, Irak, Persia and Egypt. Their old ways of thought had been exchanged for new ones; they were no longer Bedouins; they had intermarried with strangers; their insularity was gone. The opinion that good verse was written down to the end o f the second century of the Hejra may be, as far as the rules of the art go, a true judgement; but the special desert flavour of the old Kasidas is certainly lacking in the new, that splendid realism in regard to natural things, that plainness of speech and that naivete of passion which we Europeans find of such priceless value. This was Arabia's loss.
On the other hand, it is quite certain that, but for Islam and the Koran, and their conquest of Persia and the Roman Empire, a fact which made Arabian literature of world-wide importance, not even the small remnant we possess of the pre-Islamic poetry would have been preserved to us. It must be remembered that none of it all, unless we accept the story of the "Suspended Poems, "was put down in writing, but had been composed for recitation at the desert gatherings where the poets met and sang. The Kasidas passed from mouth to mouth, and as the fresh ones came, the older were gradually forgotten, so that it is extremely improbable that the world at large would ever have firmly established in the neighbouring lands, and especially in Persia and on the Persia and on the Persian frontier, where a taste for literature had long prevailed, a new curiosity sprang up in regard to the language and language of the Koran, now no longer correctly spoken by the Arabs of the emigration, became of religious as well as archaeological importance, and schools were founded whose careful duty it was to collect every scrap of pre-Islamic verse and preserve it, as Europe eight hundred years later set itself to rescue the Greek and Latin Classics. The ****s of the various Kasidas were thus permanently preserved, and have ever since fromed a subject of study, in some sort theological, in the various schools and universities of Islam. And so it was with the Moallakat, and is to the present day. This has been the World's gain.
To pass from Asia into Europe, we find the seven Poems trans- lated first in to Latin, and then from Latin into the chief languages of the West during the course of the eighteenth century. The Library of the British Museum contains them under various titles in French, German, Russian and English, the earliest English version being that of Sir William Jones, published in 1782. The present translators, therefore, are unable to claim the honour of putting an unknown work before English scholarship. At the same time, the field they have chosen will, they believe, be found practically virgin by the poetry-reading public. Sir William Jones' translation is a prose one, and its English is of the eighteenth century, polite, Latinized, and little suggestive of the wild vigour of the original Arabic. Even so, his version is all but forgotten, though Mr. Clouston included it in 1881 in his Arabian Anthology; nor has any rival translation made its appearance since. Sir charles Lyall, it is true, made a commence- ment which promised well in verse, and a single Ode of the Seven was published by him in 1885 in his excellent collection of pieces gathered from the ancient Arabian poets. But the design was not completed, and the Moallakat, as a whole, remains a stranger to us still in any form of English verse. The only other translation known to have been made is a word for word rendering in unadorned prose at Bombay by Captain Johnson, which was printed a few years ago for the use of Indian students, an excellent work of its kind, but no- thing more.
The present translators, therefore, indulge a hope that the work they have been engaged on will b accepted as an attempt, rather tardy than premature, and altogether needed, to fill a gap in English translated literature. Their aim has been to produce a volume, not for scholars only, but also for all lovers of strange and beautiful verse, such a volume, if possible, as was produced forty years ago Fitz- Gerald, when he gifted English poetry with the glorious "Quatrains of Omar khayyam."Their difficulties have been great. The **** of the Moallakat, in itself obscure, has for centuries been still farther obscured by mediaeval commentators, learned in everything except personal knowledge of the customs and ways of Bedouin thought. Townsmen by birth, this was not to be wondered at, and their mis- takes have been handed down from age to age almost as a religion.
In dealing with these, the present translators have the advantage of their long experience of the desert and desert practices, and it may be added, desert politics (for these are essentially the same now in their modern developments as they were in the Days of the Ignorance); and they believe that they have been thus able to throw new light on not a few time-honoured obscurities. The **** they have followed has been that recently published at Cairo, a **** which has been carefully revised by the learned Sheykh el shangiti, and which has received the imprimatur of the still more learned Grand Mufti, Sheykh Mohammed Abdu. To these great scholars the translators owe a debt of gratitude they here these great scholars the translators owe a debt of gratitude they here achnowledge in connection with their work, as also to Sheykh Abderrahman elAleysh of the Azhar University, and to Abdallah Effendi el Ansari of Cairo. Certain verses, however, of a contested authenticity have, for their intrinsic merit, been added to the accepted version, but in all such cases they will be found so recorded, with the authority on which they rest, in the notes at the end of the volume.
None of them are more modern than the second century of Islam.
A far more serious difficulty and intellighibly to English ears. An absolutely verbal rendering of verse in another language is nearly always a betrayal- "traduttore tradittore" says justly the Italian proverb- and this is especially true when Arabic and English are in question.
To translate baldly, where tongues are so different, is to outrage the original, and often to render it ridiculous. Fitz Gerald's freehanded method is really the only fair one, and FitzGerald's has been the model taken by the present translators. They have been careful, how- ever, nowhere to violate the ****. Each couplet stands self-comtained as in the original, and the sense has been always strictly adhered to. Only here and there words have been transposed, and more rarely words added without which no clear meaning could nave been con-veyed. Those portions especially of the Odes which deal with local events and tribal politics have needed a courageous handling, and the translators hope that the result may have justified them, and that, without referring to the explanatory notes of the Appendix, each poem will now be readable even by those who run. Above all, they hope that their justification will be found in the judgement that what they give is true poetry, a new flower of a strange and interesting kind added to the body of our English classics.
One word may be added, in conclusion, of a technical kind. While the sole responsibility of the verbal rendering has been undertaken by Lady Anne Blunt, that of the verse belongs exclusively to her co- partner in the translation. On this half of the work it is necessary to explain that- the Arabic metres, which are of extreme brilliancy to explain that- the Arabic meres, which are of extreme brilliancy, have been copied as closely in the English as the difference of the two lan-guages will permit. It has, however, been found impossible to do this absolutely or in all its details. The metrical scheme of the original is based on rules of prosody not unlike those of ancient Greece and has, besides a terminal repetition peculiar to itself. This is some- times a rhyming spondee, but more frequently a dactyl with the final syllable repeated at the end of each couplet throughout the poem. It is a form which Arabic, with its extremely regular grammatical in- flection, could hardly by any ingenuity be contrived even at the sacrifice of all meaning, in mere nonsense verses. Thus the common form of the Arabic ending would be either such a double rhyme as hearing, cheering, endearing, interfering, repeated a hundred times or more with all possible variations, or again such dactyls as fear of him, might of him, grieved for him, gone with him. These last it might where the sense is strictly prescribed and there is almost no imaginative freedom. It has therefore been decided to attempt neither the rhyme nor the terminal syllable, though advantage has been taken of all convenient occasions of conforming to the latter. Thus such expressions in the Odes as high-set the pass of it, blue-black the depths of it, dark- crowned the crest of it, may be accepted as very literal renderings, not only of the sense, but of the form of the original; while in one of the poems the opening couplets, where proper names occur, almost exactly give the rhyming cadence. Apart form this terminal detect, the metes are in close accord with those of the originals, and an attempt has been made by assonances and alliterations in the body of each couplet, still farther to imitate their peculiar sound. The Arabic language is the most accentuated in the world, intended, as has been said of it, to be shouted from hill to hill to hill, and even in translation vitiates. At the same time, there are certain changes of accent which, like the half tones in its music, have a subtle effect upon the hearer, more easily recognizden than classified. If the English reader, in reciting the"Golden Odes" aloud,, feels anything of the thrill of a sudden and unexpected pleasure caused by the cadence, independently perhaps of the meaning, as of something stronger than he is accustomed to, fiercer yet as tender, musical still, while defiant of the common rules of art, the translators' work will not have been done in vain; it will have achieved its full purpose.
See: Blunt, Lady Anne (Translated from the original Arabic) & Blunt, Wilfred Scawen (done into English Verse). The seven golden Odes of Pagan Arabia, known also as the Mo-Allakat. London: The Chiswick press, 1903, PP. ix- xxii.
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The ancient poetry of Arabia, immediately before the advent of Mohammed, is the most delightful wild flower of literature the Eastern world can show. Compared with it, all other Asiatic verse has certain garden character, the bravery of the cultured rose and jessa- mine and lily. But this has the fugitive beauty of the lily of the field, nay, of something wilder still, the flower of no field at all but of the naked desert, which after the spring rain is clothed for an instant with diminutive strange blossoms peculiar to itself and which are seen no more. All that it can be likened to with any justice is the lyrical por-tion of the older Hebrew scriptures-parts of the Book of job, the Psalms of David without their piety, the love-canticle of Solomon without its mystic meaning. In Europe the nearest analogy to it is perhaps to be found in the pre-Christian verse of Celtic Ireland, which by a strange accident was its close contemporary, and lost its wild natural impulse through the very same circumstance of the conversion of its pagan bards to an overmastering new theology.
Of its quite early history we know nothing except that it would seem to have been an indigenous product of the Arabian soil, not un- connected with the primaeval civilization of Yemen, and that it had asquired a new importance through the historical dispersion of the Yemenite clans in the second century of the Christian era and the founding of the two Arabian kingdoms of the north, Ghassan and Hira. At the time when the earliest poems of which we have any record were composed, that is to say, some three centuries later, the whole of the Peninsula was in the occupation of more of less kindred pastoral communities, following the same customs, speaking the same language, and bound by the same code of honour in peace and war.
Each tribal section had its own dira, or pasturing district, beyond whose limits its flocks and herds did not wander, nor the tents of its women. The chief men, however, of whatever clan, were not thus to be con-fined, and, besides the raids of many hundred miles they made in wartime, traveled far afield in time of peace, and, wherever there was no blood feud, passed from tribe to tribe to tribe, enjoying hospitality, seeking adventures, and reciting, with what talent they had, their verses. As such singers and warriors became known and their fame spread abroad, there sprang up a competiti on among the tribe sheikhs to receive them, and especially the Arab kings of Hira and Ghassan liked to attract them to their courts. It gave these princes an intellectual amusement to be thus surrounded, flattered their vanity and enlarged their influence. It was through the medium of the two rival Courts of the north that the the poets of Arabia got indirectly their knowledge of the world outside. The prince of Hira was tributary to the kesra (Chrosroes) of Persia, and the prince of Ghassan was tributary in like manner to the kaisar (Caesar) of Byza Rome. Faint echoes of the resplendent imperial names are to be heard in the Arabian poetry, but they are echoes only, coming from afar and received at second hand.
It is not difficult for any one who has traveled in modern Nejd to form to himself a picture of what these princely courts them were.
They cannot have differed much from those of the Ibn Saouds and the Ibn Rashids of to-day. The Prince, half Bedouin half townsman, was in his desert quality still sbeykh of his own noble tribe enriched by his bounties. In the city where he had built himself a fortress, he was hakim, its lord and king. He took his tax of the settled population of the desert edge through the fedawin, his Arab guard of foot-soldiers. The winter months of cold and the extreme heats of summer saw him delivering months of cold and in his castle; the spring and outumn saw him in his tents, or on horseback making foray on his enemies. The Arab strangers came and went, were enter- tained and departed as they would, some singing his praises for largess received, others in dudgeon because neglected. All alike defiant of outhority in act and word.
They were hawks of too wild a plumage to be reclaimed by threats of cajoleries into permanent service. Thus at the present day one finds, even now in England-ridden Egypt, certain Bedouins from Central Arabia, waifs from the noble tribes of Muteyr and Harb and Ateybeh, always clustered in semi-service round the khedivial court at koubba. Here and there among them may be discovered a poet, here and there a rebab player; all are horsemen. They come and serve for a while as rakibin (riders) to mount and break the khedivial colts or the khedivial camels. They are ornamental appari-tions in their gay dresses and equipments, are good horse-masters and honest in their service. But manual labour they will not condescend to do, nor will they be drilled as soldiers, nor sleep in houses, nor wear uniforms. At the least huff they are away. They go forth from the palace outspoken in the Prince's blame or praise, nor will money tempt them back nor the thought of fear or favour.
In their own land the poets of the Ignorance, for such is the name given them by Islamic writers, were sometimes themselves princes or of princely family. They were at least free gentlemen of blood and lineage, undedased by toil and ignoring the "dignity of labour."
They were warriors and knights errant, the heroes of their own romances prompt with sword and spear, horsemen and camel-riders, tent-dwell-ers from their childhood and inured to physical hardships of all kinds. Outdoor doers of wild deeds, these valorous desert song-masters were no mere decadents, the "idle singers of an empty day," but men determined to live every hour of their gay lives, to enjoy every joy within their reach to their pleasure's uttermost. Here we find nothing of the Ossianic gloom of our own archaic bards, nothing of the super stitious doubts and conscience-stricken terrors of mediaeval Europe in fear of things beyond the grave, nothing of the theological limitations of the later Moslem verse. All with them is frankly, inspiritingly, stupendously hedonistic.
The primitive Arabs, just as are still their true Bedouin descend- ants, were rank materialists. They believed in neither heaven nor hell, nor in any life beyond the one they were enjoying. Of religion they understood nothing but a vague monotheism, tempered with just enough idolatry to make oath by, but not enough to modify their lives. They were the least superstitious of mankind, the least influenced by fetish fears and hobgoblin terrors. It was their habit to be abroad at night or to sit round their camp-fires under the stats in mirth and song, and then to sleep by day, a mode of living which gave but little room for idle ghost fancies born of indoor ways and the dread of darkness. There was none of that fear of loneliness, that Awe of mountain solitudes that for thousands of years haunted the European mind, and made the snowfields of the Alps and the great pine forests of Germany the fearful home of fabulous powers and shapes to be avoided. It is the townsman in the East, the dweller in houses of stone and brick, that trembles at the thought of the jinns, not he whose dwelling is the "house of hair." The Bedouin knows his deserts far too well to be dream that they are unnaturally in- habited. The noises he hears in the darkness he reads the next morn-ing as in a book, explained by the tracks left by the night prowler in the sand. There is no sound, no voic in all the desert that he does not recognize as one familiar from his childhood, and always to be accounted for by natural causes. Why then should he be afraid? The absence of the supernatural is the distinguishing feature, as con-trasted with all other primitive poetries, of the poetry of the Arabian Ignorance.
In morals, the pre-Islamic Arabs, in spite of certain lapses, stood notably higher than any of their neighbours in Asia. It must be remembered, however, that their rule of conduct was based upon no religious sanction, but avowedly on personal and tribal honour, that is to say, on traditional opinion. The Virtues they adored were courage, generosity, lavish hospitality, the protection of the weak and of all who came to them as suppliants, a readiness to succour a friend and revenge a wrong, a prompt self-sacrifice for the tribe's sake in peace or war. Their courage was of a different quality, perhaps, from that admired among ourselves. It was the valour of a nervous, excitable people who required encouragement from onlookers and from their own voices to do their best, defiance before the battle, immoderate boasting afterwards. It needed not seldom the taunts of their women to make them face their foes of stop their flight. It is still the custom in cases of warfare of a serious kind in Arabia for the tribe to take its womenfolk with it on a campaign, as obliging even the laggards to fight manfully, and they have a girl accompanying them mounted on a camel who sings and shouts to them during the combat. Thus worked upon, the tribesmen fear neither death nor wounds, and become heroic. So, too, with their generosity, there is always in it an element of vainglory which finds strengthening in the presence of friends. A great sheikh, even if he is secretly parsimonious, will give prodigally in public out of regard for his neighbours' eyes, for the fame of an open hand gains many adherents. The motive is per-haps not a high one, yet it is a wholesome in any society that to give should be counted of more glory than to keep, and with some among them the freehandedness is very real. The true master-ing virtue, however, of Arabia is its hospitality. There, it would be a shame for the poorest and meanest to refuse a stranger, nor would any, though he were alone, turn such away from his tent-door. Con-science would step in and prevent so great a failure of honour. Another-matter of conscience is the blood revenge. This in a noble Arabian mind becomes a passionate prompting, almost a physical necessity, which if it be not obeyed will deprive its subject of sleep, of appetite, of health, and leave him a miserable man. On the same footing, in a minor degree, stand the duties of succouring the weak and protecting suppliants who have thrown themselves beneath the protector's cloak, even should he be an enemy. In all these instances a well-born Arab will act on principles which it would be idle not to recognize as moral, yet wich are neither held as binding by Moslems in general, nor are practiced with fidelity any where else in western Asia but only in Arabia.
Towards women, the Arabs of the Ignorance were at the same time devoted and practical. The girls and matrons of the tribe were no salves or chattels, as in primitive Europe, but essentially free-born women with their right of choice before marriage, and of leaving the domestic hearth, if dissatisfied, after marriage. They were made much of the women in most other lands of the pagan East, but also than those of contemporary Christendom. Many of them were as courage-ous and as well educated, if the word can be used of a people who none of them could read or write, as their husbands or their lovers.
The Arabs, therefore had in their womenkind the material of a high romance, and they built on it the whole scheme of chivalry which we are accustomed to consider an exclusively Christian condition of things, but which in fact mediaeval Europe imitated and developed on lines of its own from the original Arab model, brought through Africa into Spain. Knight-errantry, the riding forth on horseback in search of adventures, the rescue of captive maidens, the succour rendered everywhere to women in adversity, all these were essentially Arabian ideas, as was the very name of chivalry, the connection of honourable conduct with the horse-rider, the man of noble blood, the cavalier. Genealogy, the pride of lineage, the belief in the quality of blood ancestrally inherited as something superior either to riches or to blood ancestrally inherited as something superior either to riches or to any other accidental advantage, and conferring on its owner moral characteristics impossible of acquisition by the vulgar, were no less essentially Arabian and, if found at all elsewhere than among the Arabs, were nowhere so intensely believed in. Devotion to a woman nobly born, of their own noble race and people, is the theme their poets love to dwell on, and always stands foremost in their scheme of romance. It is the keynote initially struck of every poem of the Moallakat. At the same time there is this difference between the devotion of the Arabian lover and that of his imitator in Europe, that the Christian idea of continence as a special virtue does not enter at all into the Arab conception of love; the Bedouin troubadours liked wholly to enjoy their loves. And so too in their rhymes; the cruel and disdainful damsel finds little place in pre-Islamic verse, rather she who has been kind and whom adverse fate has torn away. It is almost always the woman loved and lost that is mourned by them with the most passionate longing, for whom they perform their most glorious deeds, and whom they celebrate in their most enduring songs, the recollection of a short connubial season spent in the enormous solitude of the desert in some shut valley of the desolate hills green for those few sweet weeks of spring and love, then and left un- beautiful for ever.
There is no part of the earth's surface where love exists under such strenuous and endearing conditions as the Arabian desert, where the souls of man and women are knit so closely by the immense isolation of their lives, where either becomes so dependent on the other by the constant pressure of material dangers. Each little beyt shaar, 'house of hair,' is as a fortress in the wilderness, set up alone in some far valley against the forces of Nature and held there by its dual garrison. In the open plain with its wild, parsimonious beauty, every bush and stone, every beetle lizard, every rare track of jerboa, gazelle or ostrich on the sand, become of value and is remembered, it may be years after-wards, while the stones of the camp-fires stand black and deserted in testimony of the brief season of love. It is only at the time of the rahla or general moving of the camp that the tribe comes together, the men leading their flocks and herds. And the women seated, each family in its bowdaj or curtained panier, on its tallest camel, and sing-ing as they go. It is always a brilliant spectacle, and one that lives in memory, as the converging lines wind up the valleys at sunrise and over the crests of the hills to their new pastures. This is what Zoheyr so beautifully sings in his poem of the Moallakat. His Om-Aufa is the woman he has loved, who has borne him a son, and who is gone. She has left him of her own free will, perhaps by his own fault, perhaps by cruel circumstance, but he shall see her no more. Bedouin romance reaches no higher point than this. The love does not touch him which has been loved in vain. And in truth, love of this sweet domestic kind is not the sole though it is always the lead-ing theme of these wild singers. Mere passion, for pleasure and adventure's sake, is referred to often, and not seldom in boasting terms of favours recived or won. The reader of the Moallakat must not expect to find in them the refinements of our drawing-room soul- wooers. Neither are the loves of angels in them nor the loves of boys.
Love, however, of any kind, material or ideal, never filled the whole range of vision of the Bedouin singer. More important in his mind are always his dealings with men, and to these he returns as a duty from his excursions in the kingdom of romance. If he boasts occa-sionally of his the battlefield, in the council tent, as an entertainer of guests, and even, to his shame, as a wine-biber. The drinking of wine was considered in pre-Islamic Arabia the test of a generous fancy, and it was no discredit for a young noble to waste his substance in treating his companions to skin of the resin-cured juice of the grape, put up to auction at the wine-seller's even until all was gone. This, with their love of gambling, is the change in manners we find between the ancient Arabia of the Moallakat and the modern Arabia where wine and games of chance wholly unknown. Moral blemishes not a few there are in all the poems, but one would not wish them absent, for they serve to point the reality of the life described. An astonishingly vivid realism is indeed their chief characteristic, and we may well forgive these roistering singers when they tell us of their lapses in view of the splendid pictures they given us of the sights and sounds and natural wonders of the desert with which they were all familiar. Not even in the Book of job do we find nobler presentments of four- foot life than in the Moallakat. The horse, the camel, the an-telope, the wolf, these are over and over again depicted, the wild ass and that most wonderful of created things, the ostrich with its brood. What would we not give for pictures of this naturalistic value in our own ancient poets of the wild ox of Europe, the elk, the beaver and the bear? It was with these living wild creatures that the poets of the Ignorance lived, and it was these that they described, these and the storms which occasionally wrecked their valleys, blotting out in a night the memorial stones of their encampments so touchingly re- membered; the sun's heat in their long day marches; the stars hung overhead at night like lamps from the firmament; the ships seen from their sea-coasts; and yet again their camels and their horses, for it was always to these that their thoughts returned, and which they did not weary of depicting or fear to weary their listeners with.
Such was Arabia in the first century before Islam, and such the nature of its poets. Of all that won distinction among them, the most noted were the seven authors of the Mudahabat, "The Golden Odes," known also as the Moallakat. The tradition with regard to these is that, at the annual fair held at Okad, in western Nejd, each poet recited a set piece of verse, Kasida, it being put to the popular vote to decide upon their merits; and that afterwards those poems which had been judged the best were set down in golden manuscript and hung up in the Kaaba at Mecca, and so received the name of the "Golden Odes" or "The Suspended Poems." It is, however, ex- tremely doubtful whether the whole of this story is true. All that is recorded in attestation of it by the early Islamic commentators is con- tained in a passage of the Kitab El Aghani, the work of the celebrated Abulfaraj of Ispahan, who, writing in the third century of the Hejra, states on authority he considered valid, that Amr ibn Kolthum's poem was recited both by himself and by men of his tribe at Okad and at Mecca. There is no word, however, in this narrative, of the poem having been reduced to writing, or of its having been hung up in the Kaaba or elsewhere; and what is far more probable is that the story is an attempt by later scholars to find a meaning for the rather obscure titles given to the poems, consonant with modern Mohammedan ideas. As has been well pointed out by Sir Charles Lyall in his exhaustive monograph on the subject, the art of writing was, if not unknown, at least very little practiced by the Pagan Arabs, while the allusion to the fine Egyptian linen and the letters of gold, is also somewhat suspicious, as suggesting an epoch when Arabian intercourse with Egypt was closer than in pre-Islamic days.
Be this, however, as it may, the "seven Golden Odes" or the "seven Suspended poems," have come to be considered the classic poems, and have obtained for their authors a special position as the most famous singers of Pagan Arabia. The date of the earliest of them, Imr el Kais, is reckoned to be about the year A.d. 545, and that of the latest, Zoheyr's, about A.D 605, OR within twenty years of the preaching of Islam.
It is a matter of dispute what was the precise effect of the new doctrine on the poetic impulse of Arabia. European writers are gener- ally of opinion that the revelation of the Koran checked, if it did not a once Kill, the wild natural growth of song in the Peninsula. They argue that all dogmatic religions, enthusiastically embraced, have a tendency to fill the whole field of passionate imagination to the ex- clusion of rival passions, and that Islam was fatal to Arabian poetry, justs as Christianity had been fatal to the poetry of Greece and Rome. It is certain that the pleasure-loving desert bards were, at least in their praise of lawless love. And wine, out of harmony with the austere thought of Islam. The Liberal school, however, of Mohammedan teaching altogether that either the prophet or his immediate successors were hostile to the poets. The two first Caliphs, Abu Bekr and Omar, are traditionally Known to have had the national bards in their in- timacy, and it was not till long after, say the 'Ulema, that Arabian poetry began to decline. They hold the verse composed under the Ommayyad Caliphs to be on a level with the best of pagan times.
Nevertheless, it is difficult not to recognize a decay in certain qualities of the later verse which if not due to Mohammedan teaching was at least the result of Islam's triumph in the world. Arabia, within a few years of the Prophet's death, had, like a pent-up flood, overflowed the neighbouring lands, and the outpouring had left the peninsula de-pleted of its most vigorous tribes. All that was best of them had passed outside the desert borders and had become city dwellers, in Syria, Irak, Persia and Egypt. Their old ways of thought had been exchanged for new ones; they were no longer Bedouins; they had intermarried with strangers; their insularity was gone. The opinion that good verse was written down to the end o f the second century of the Hejra may be, as far as the rules of the art go, a true judgement; but the special desert flavour of the old Kasidas is certainly lacking in the new, that splendid realism in regard to natural things, that plainness of speech and that naivete of passion which we Europeans find of such priceless value. This was Arabia's loss.
On the other hand, it is quite certain that, but for Islam and the Koran, and their conquest of Persia and the Roman Empire, a fact which made Arabian literature of world-wide importance, not even the small remnant we possess of the pre-Islamic poetry would have been preserved to us. It must be remembered that none of it all, unless we accept the story of the "Suspended Poems, "was put down in writing, but had been composed for recitation at the desert gatherings where the poets met and sang. The Kasidas passed from mouth to mouth, and as the fresh ones came, the older were gradually forgotten, so that it is extremely improbable that the world at large would ever have firmly established in the neighbouring lands, and especially in Persia and on the Persia and on the Persian frontier, where a taste for literature had long prevailed, a new curiosity sprang up in regard to the language and language of the Koran, now no longer correctly spoken by the Arabs of the emigration, became of religious as well as archaeological importance, and schools were founded whose careful duty it was to collect every scrap of pre-Islamic verse and preserve it, as Europe eight hundred years later set itself to rescue the Greek and Latin Classics. The ****s of the various Kasidas were thus permanently preserved, and have ever since fromed a subject of study, in some sort theological, in the various schools and universities of Islam. And so it was with the Moallakat, and is to the present day. This has been the World's gain.
To pass from Asia into Europe, we find the seven Poems trans- lated first in to Latin, and then from Latin into the chief languages of the West during the course of the eighteenth century. The Library of the British Museum contains them under various titles in French, German, Russian and English, the earliest English version being that of Sir William Jones, published in 1782. The present translators, therefore, are unable to claim the honour of putting an unknown work before English scholarship. At the same time, the field they have chosen will, they believe, be found practically virgin by the poetry-reading public. Sir William Jones' translation is a prose one, and its English is of the eighteenth century, polite, Latinized, and little suggestive of the wild vigour of the original Arabic. Even so, his version is all but forgotten, though Mr. Clouston included it in 1881 in his Arabian Anthology; nor has any rival translation made its appearance since. Sir charles Lyall, it is true, made a commence- ment which promised well in verse, and a single Ode of the Seven was published by him in 1885 in his excellent collection of pieces gathered from the ancient Arabian poets. But the design was not completed, and the Moallakat, as a whole, remains a stranger to us still in any form of English verse. The only other translation known to have been made is a word for word rendering in unadorned prose at Bombay by Captain Johnson, which was printed a few years ago for the use of Indian students, an excellent work of its kind, but no- thing more.
The present translators, therefore, indulge a hope that the work they have been engaged on will b accepted as an attempt, rather tardy than premature, and altogether needed, to fill a gap in English translated literature. Their aim has been to produce a volume, not for scholars only, but also for all lovers of strange and beautiful verse, such a volume, if possible, as was produced forty years ago Fitz- Gerald, when he gifted English poetry with the glorious "Quatrains of Omar khayyam."Their difficulties have been great. The **** of the Moallakat, in itself obscure, has for centuries been still farther obscured by mediaeval commentators, learned in everything except personal knowledge of the customs and ways of Bedouin thought. Townsmen by birth, this was not to be wondered at, and their mis- takes have been handed down from age to age almost as a religion.
In dealing with these, the present translators have the advantage of their long experience of the desert and desert practices, and it may be added, desert politics (for these are essentially the same now in their modern developments as they were in the Days of the Ignorance); and they believe that they have been thus able to throw new light on not a few time-honoured obscurities. The **** they have followed has been that recently published at Cairo, a **** which has been carefully revised by the learned Sheykh el shangiti, and which has received the imprimatur of the still more learned Grand Mufti, Sheykh Mohammed Abdu. To these great scholars the translators owe a debt of gratitude they here these great scholars the translators owe a debt of gratitude they here achnowledge in connection with their work, as also to Sheykh Abderrahman elAleysh of the Azhar University, and to Abdallah Effendi el Ansari of Cairo. Certain verses, however, of a contested authenticity have, for their intrinsic merit, been added to the accepted version, but in all such cases they will be found so recorded, with the authority on which they rest, in the notes at the end of the volume.
None of them are more modern than the second century of Islam.
A far more serious difficulty and intellighibly to English ears. An absolutely verbal rendering of verse in another language is nearly always a betrayal- "traduttore tradittore" says justly the Italian proverb- and this is especially true when Arabic and English are in question.
To translate baldly, where tongues are so different, is to outrage the original, and often to render it ridiculous. Fitz Gerald's freehanded method is really the only fair one, and FitzGerald's has been the model taken by the present translators. They have been careful, how- ever, nowhere to violate the ****. Each couplet stands self-comtained as in the original, and the sense has been always strictly adhered to. Only here and there words have been transposed, and more rarely words added without which no clear meaning could nave been con-veyed. Those portions especially of the Odes which deal with local events and tribal politics have needed a courageous handling, and the translators hope that the result may have justified them, and that, without referring to the explanatory notes of the Appendix, each poem will now be readable even by those who run. Above all, they hope that their justification will be found in the judgement that what they give is true poetry, a new flower of a strange and interesting kind added to the body of our English classics.
One word may be added, in conclusion, of a technical kind. While the sole responsibility of the verbal rendering has been undertaken by Lady Anne Blunt, that of the verse belongs exclusively to her co- partner in the translation. On this half of the work it is necessary to explain that- the Arabic metres, which are of extreme brilliancy to explain that- the Arabic meres, which are of extreme brilliancy, have been copied as closely in the English as the difference of the two lan-guages will permit. It has, however, been found impossible to do this absolutely or in all its details. The metrical scheme of the original is based on rules of prosody not unlike those of ancient Greece and has, besides a terminal repetition peculiar to itself. This is some- times a rhyming spondee, but more frequently a dactyl with the final syllable repeated at the end of each couplet throughout the poem. It is a form which Arabic, with its extremely regular grammatical in- flection, could hardly by any ingenuity be contrived even at the sacrifice of all meaning, in mere nonsense verses. Thus the common form of the Arabic ending would be either such a double rhyme as hearing, cheering, endearing, interfering, repeated a hundred times or more with all possible variations, or again such dactyls as fear of him, might of him, grieved for him, gone with him. These last it might where the sense is strictly prescribed and there is almost no imaginative freedom. It has therefore been decided to attempt neither the rhyme nor the terminal syllable, though advantage has been taken of all convenient occasions of conforming to the latter. Thus such expressions in the Odes as high-set the pass of it, blue-black the depths of it, dark- crowned the crest of it, may be accepted as very literal renderings, not only of the sense, but of the form of the original; while in one of the poems the opening couplets, where proper names occur, almost exactly give the rhyming cadence. Apart form this terminal detect, the metes are in close accord with those of the originals, and an attempt has been made by assonances and alliterations in the body of each couplet, still farther to imitate their peculiar sound. The Arabic language is the most accentuated in the world, intended, as has been said of it, to be shouted from hill to hill to hill, and even in translation vitiates. At the same time, there are certain changes of accent which, like the half tones in its music, have a subtle effect upon the hearer, more easily recognizden than classified. If the English reader, in reciting the"Golden Odes" aloud,, feels anything of the thrill of a sudden and unexpected pleasure caused by the cadence, independently perhaps of the meaning, as of something stronger than he is accustomed to, fiercer yet as tender, musical still, while defiant of the common rules of art, the translators' work will not have been done in vain; it will have achieved its full purpose.
See: Blunt, Lady Anne (Translated from the original Arabic) & Blunt, Wilfred Scawen (done into English Verse). The seven golden Odes of Pagan Arabia, known also as the Mo-Allakat. London: The Chiswick press, 1903, PP. ix- xxii.