The Epistle of Forgiveness. Abu l-'Ala al-Ma'arri

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СКАЧАТЬ the one who is resentful; not him!” I said to him, “You do not know him. By God, he is inflexible and one cannot hope for any favors from him.131 He has a frame of mind that encourages him to be disrespectful and that makes respect for people’s rights seem hateful to him. He is far from having a character that rejects rejection but is amiable and loves mutual affection. It is as if he, in his arrogance, rides the celestial sphere and has seated himself on the galaxy-striped sky. Yet I am not the type to seek out anyone who seeks disassociation from his companionship, or to draw toward anyone who inclines toward withdrawal from his friendship.132 When I saw how thoughtlessly he acted without doing me justice in his excessive pride, I wiped away his name from the page of my heart and considered my affection for him as something swept away by the river’s flow.

      For if the bonds with you are frayed, others will make ties;

      There are places I can turn to on earth, away from an abode of hate.”133

      7.6.2

      وأنشدت الرجلَ أبياتًا أعتذر بها في قطعي له:

فلو كان منه الخيرُ إذ كان شَرُّه	عتيدًا، لقلنا: إِن خيرًا مع الشرِّ
ولو كان – إِذ لا خيرَ – لا شرَّ عنده	صَبَرْنا وقُلنا لا يَرِيشُ ولا يبْرِي
ولكنه شرٌّ ولا خيرَ عنده	وليس على شرٍّ إِذا دام من صَبْرِ

      وبُغضي له - شهد الله – حيًّا ومَيِّتًا، أوجبه أخذُه محاريبَ الكعبة، الذهب والفضّة. وضربها دنانير ودراهم وسمّاها الكعبية، وأنهب العرب الرَّملة. وخرّب بغداد وكم دمٍ سفك، وحريم انتهك، وحُرّة أرمل، وصبيّ أيتم!

      I recited some verses to the man, justifying myself in them for breaking off my contact with him:

      If any good thing came from him, whose badness comes so readily,

      then we could say: the good comes with the bad!

      And if he had no bad, as well as nothing good,

      we could endure it, saying: “he’s no fletcher and no trimmer!”134

      But he is bad and there’s no good in him;

      and badness, when it lasts, can’t be endured.

      My hatred of him, whether alive or dead—God is my witness—is the inevitable result of the fact that he appropriated the gold and silver niches of the Kaaba and coined them into dinars and dirhams, which he called “Kaaba coins.”135 He made the Bedouins plunder al-Ramlah and he laid Baghdad in ruins. So much blood did he shed, and so many women did he ravish, widowing free women and orphaning little children!

      Praise of al-Maʿarrī

      8

      وأنا معتذر إلى الشيخ الجليل من تقريظه مع تفريطي^١ فيه، لأنه قد شاع فضلُه في جميع البشر، وصار غُرّةً على جبهة الشمس والقمر. خلُد ذلك في بدائع الأخبار، وكُتِبَ بسواد الليل على بياض النهار. وأنا في مكاتبة حضرته بمنظومٍ ومنثور، كمن أمدّ النار بالشرر، وأهدى الضوء إلى القمر، وصبّ في البحر جُرعةً، وأعار سير الفلك سُرعة، إذ كان لا يحلّ النقص بواديه، ولا يطور السهو بناديه.

      ولقد سمعتُ من رسائله عقائل لفظٍ إن نعتُّها فقد عِبتُها، وإن وصفتُها فما أنصفتها. وأطربتْني – يشهد الله – إطراب السماع. وبالله لو صَدَرَت عن صدر مَن خِزانتُه وكتبه حوله، يُقلّب طرْفه في هذا ويرجع إلى هذا – فإن القلم لسان اليد وهو أحد البلاغتين – لكان ذلك عجيبًا صعبًا شديدًا. ووالله لقد رأيت علماء، منهم ابن خالَوَيه إذا قُرِئَت عليهم الكتب، ولا سيما الكبار، رجعوا إلى أصولهم كالمقابلين يتحفظون من سهو وتصحيف وغلط.

      والعجب العجيب والنادر الغريب، حِفْظُه – أدام الله تأييده – لأسماء الرجال والمنثور، كحفْظ غيره من الأذكياء المبرّزين المنظوم، وهذا سهل بالقول صعب بالفعل، من سمعه طمع فيه، ومن رامه امتَنَعَت عليه معانيه ومبانيه.

      ١ في النسخ: (تقريظي).

      I ask the venerable Sheikh to excuse me when I laud him, even though I fall short of doing him justice, because his excellence has spread among all people and he has become a bright light on the brow of the sun and the moon. This has been immortalized in wonderful reports and has been written night-black on day-white. In writing to his noble person in verse and in prose I am like someone who fuels a fire with a spark, who presents the moon with a gift of light, who pours a mouthful into the sea, or who lends speed to that of the celestial sphere; for no shortcoming settles in his valley and no inadvertence nears his assembly.

      I have heard the Sheikhs’s epistles being read, which contain expressions so exquisite that if I extolled them I would have disgraced them, and which if I described them I would not have done justice to them. I was enraptured by them—God is my witness—as if enraptured by music. By God, if they were produced by someone who had his library and his books around him, turning his eyes now to this, and then to that—for “the pen is the tongue of the hand and one of the two kinds of eloquence”—it would be an amazingly difficult feat. By God, I have seen scholars such as Ibn Khālawayh who, when books were studied under their supervision, especially large ones, would consult their exemplars, like those who collate copies of texts in order to guard themselves against slips, misspellings, or errors.

      But what is a truly amazing and an extraordinary and rare thing, is the Sheikh’s memory—may God always support him!—of people’s names and prose texts, just as other intelligent and eminent people memorize poetry. It is easy to say but hard to do; he who hears of it aspires to it, but if he aims for it, he finds it impossible to achieve it in meaning and form.136

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