Arabic Poems Translated by A Z Foreman- Poems Found in Translation

Poems Found in Translation: “AbÅ« Nuwās: Wine, Boys and Song (From Arabic)” plus 1 more AbÅ« Nuwās: Wine, Boys and Song (From Arabic) Posted: 19 May 2015 11:55 AM PDT Wine, Boys and Song By AbÅ« Nuwās Translated by A.Z. Foreman Sing me a song, sweet Sulayman,  and quench me with sweet wine. When the bottle comes around, pass it  with your hands into mine.  Look! Morning's in the sky, already its flaxen loincloth shines.  With cups of comfort wash the call  to prayer from my mind.  Give me some wine to drink public,  then fuck me from behind. The Original: قال ابو نواس ياسُلَيْمانُ غَنّني ØŒ ومِنَ الرّاحِ فاسْـقِـني  فإذا دَارَتِ الزّجـا جَـة ُ خُـذْها ØŒ وعاطِني  ما تَرَى الصّبْحَ قَدْ بَدا في إزارٍ مُبَيِّنِ عاطِـني كأسَ سَـلْوَة ٍ عَنْ أذانِ المؤذِّنِ  اسْقِـني الخمْرَ جهْرَةً وألْـِطني ØŒ وأزْنني  Al-Muhalhil: Vengeance at Dawn (From Arabic) Posted: 19 May 2015 12:36 AM PDT Today's poet is ˁAdÄ« bin Rabīˁa of Taghlib, commonly known as Al-Muhalhil "The Verse-Weaver." Born presumably at the very end of the 5th century, he is among the earliest poets to whom any surviving verse of substantive length is attributed. He is chiefly known for poems dealing with the BasÅ«s War, in which a 40-year feud between the tribes of Taghlib and Bakr was ignited when his brother Kulayb was killed for slaughtering another tribe's stray camel. See my deflationary note after the poem for more.  I have translated this poem into roughly iambic five-beat distichs. Following my now-standard practice in translating classical poetry from Arabic and related literatures, I have substituted assonance for monorhyme.    Vengeance at Dawn By Al-Muhalhil of Taghlib Translated by A.Z. Foreman Click to hear me recite the original Arabic Long was my night of wake at Anˁamayn  while sleepless at the ceaseless stars I gazed. How can I age in life while a slain man  of Taghlib still calls for a man to be slain? O chide the eye weeping rueful over ruins! In the breast a wound lies open for Kulayb. In the breast is a bloody need unsatisfied as long as doves among the branches wail. How can he weep over ruined things who has pledged himself to battle men across the ages? How can I forget you, Kulayb, when I've yet to quell the sorrow whelming me, the blood-parched rage? Today O heart, make good your bloody vow. When they ride forth at morn, retaliate! They grip their bows, and we flash lightning bolts as stallions threatening their stallion prey. We steel ourselves beneath their flashing steel  till they fall pounded by our long hard blades And can keep up no more. We keep attacking  for he who keeps the field is war's true mate.  Deflationary note: While pre-Islamic tribal poetry has a number of facets to it and might be summarized very crudely as a literature of love, loss, pride and war, the social order it appears to suggest is dominated by feuding, ancient grudges and warfare in defense of honor, a world in which existence itself was a dangerous game, where stoicism and hardiness were the only bulwarks against callous fate and inevitable heartbreak. I might leave it at that, as many do, if I wanted to avoid angry emails. But since I have yet to set forth my most recent views on this matter, and since the social world of pre-Islamic corpus is often wrongly taken at face value by scholars who rightly take the poetry as basically genuine material, my concern for reality compels me to say a bit more. Even apart from the fact that there are some poets who at least some of the time hint at a more sedate reality, there is another seldom examined resource which can provide a contextual background for the social order suggested by the pre-Islamic poems. There are other tribal nomad-pastoralist desert societies whose climactic, structural and economic conditions have much in common with pre-Islamic bedu, and who maintained their way of being well into the 20th century, long enough that anthropologists and ethnographers were able to give accounts of them, or interview individuals old enough to remember pre-sedentary life. Examples include the Rwala of the northern Najd, the Tuareg of the central western Sahara, and the OgadÄ“n nomads of the southern Somali highlands. Jonathan A.C. Brown's comparative work on the Muˁallaqāt, informed by accounts of some of these more recent societies (though he does not consider the Tuareg) offers a welcome splash of reality, one which becomes all the more instructive in light of what is known of relations between settled Arab kingdoms (largely client-states of Persia and Byzantium) and nomadic Arabs in the 6th century. It would appear that, though such societies often perceive and portray themselves as a "people of war and honor" characterized by perpetual conflict, this is often more self-image than reality. Accounts of legendary bloodbaths in the past serve to rationalize current disputes and divisions among related lineage groups, but pragmatic reality often means that cooperation - even at the expense of honor - is far more essential and therefore the norm, and feuding is avoided when possible. Combat when it occurs can be far more ritualized, and less lethal, than that of empires that maintain a standing army. Excessive and protracted large-scale bloodshed which endangers delicate social institutions and threatens access to shared resources is rare. If anything, the worst and bloodiest episodes appear to be conflicts with encroaching sedentary peoples, and centralized polities (such as the Ghassanid and Lakhmid dynasties of old or, more recently, the Saudi State) attempting to subdue them. In the case of pre-Islamic Arabia, the exaggerated self-perception evident in the poems drawn from oral lore, likely for the edification of the Umayyad ruling class at first, ended up being coopted (and at least somewhat sanitized) in the Islamic period by Muslim scholars all too willing to see pre-Islamic nomadic Arabians as a society of brave and and honorable, but impetuous and ignorant, pagans, as Noble Savages who needed The True Faith of Islam to civilize and unite them, a people you'd want to be descended from but would by no means want to be. It is telling that Imru'l-Qays, last of the princes of Kindah and most celebrated of pre-Islamic poets, is portrayed in early Islamic literary compendia as the epitome of "paganness" in his barbarism, impetuousness and ignorant obstinacy, whereas the real Imru'l-Qays, if he was a Kindite prince in the mid-6th century, was likely not a polytheist at all but a Jew or perhaps a Christian and may have had a life rather at variance with what the famous qaṣīda attributed to him has been taken to suggest. The Original: باتَ لَيلي بالأَنْعَمَين طَويلا  Ø£ÙŽØ±Ù’قُبُ النَجْمَ ساهِراً لَنْ يَزولا كَيف أٌمدي ولَا يزالُ قتيلٌ مِن بَني وائلٍ يُنادي قتيلا أُزْجُرِ الْعَينَ أَنْ تُبَكِّي الطُلولا إِنَّ في الصَدْرِ مِنْ كُلَيبٍ فَليلا إِنَّ في الصَدْرِ حاجةً لَنْ تُقَضَّى ما دَعا في الغُصونِ داعٍ هَديلا كَيفَ يَبْكي الطُلولَ Ù…ÙŽÙ† هو رَهْنٌ بِطِعانِ الأنامِ جيلا فَجِيلا كَيف أَنساكَ يا كلَيبُ  ÙˆÙ„مّا أقضِ حُزناً ينوبُني وغَليلا أيُّها القَلبُ أَنْجِزِ اليومَ نَحْباً مِن بني الحِصْنِ إذ غَدوا وذُحولا انتَضَوا مَعْجِسَ القِسي وأَبْرَقْـنا كَما تُوعِد الفُحولُ الفُحولا وصَبَرْنا تَحتَ البوارِقِ حتَّى دَكْدَكَتْ فيهِمِ السُيوفُ طَويلا لم يُطيقوا أنْ يَنْزِلوا ونَزَلْنا وَأَخو الحَربِ Ù…ÙŽÙ† أَطاقَ النُزولا  Romanization: Bāta laylÄ« bi-l-'Anˁamayni á¹­awÄ«lā arqubu l-najma sāhiran lan yazÅ«lā Kayfa umdÄ« wa-lā yazālu qatÄ«lun min BanÄ« Wā'ilin yunādÄ« qatÄ«lā Uzjuri l-ˁayna an tubakkÄ« l-á¹­ulÅ«lā inna fÄ« l-á¹£adri min Kulaybin falÄ«lā Inna fÄ« l-á¹£adri ħājatan lan tuqaḍḍā mā daˁā fÄ« l-É£uṣūni dāˁin hadÄ«lā Kayfa yabkÄ« l-á¹­ulÅ«la man huwa rahnun bi-á¹­iˁāni l-'anāmi jÄ«lan fa-jÄ«lā Kayfa ansāka yā Kulaybu wa-lammā aqḍi ħuznan yanÅ«bunÄ« wa-É£alÄ«lā Ayyuhā l-qalbu anjizi l-yawma naħban min BanÄ« l-Ħiá¹£ni ið É£adaw wa-ðuħūlā Intaḍaw maˁjisa l-qisiyyi wa-'abraqnā kamā tūˁidu l-fuħūlu l-fuħūlā Wa-á¹£abarnā taħta l-bawāriqi ħattā dakdakat fÄ«himi l-suyÅ«fu á¹­awÄ«lā Lam yuá¹­Ä«qÅ« an yanzilÅ« wa-nazalnā wa-'axÅ« l-ħarbi man aṭāqa l-nuzÅ«lā