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

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      Language, Style, and Translation

      The present translators originally harbored some doubts about translating the text in full. However, it is the admirable purpose of the Library of Arabic Literature to present complete texts, in the original Arabic and in an English translation. We consented and took on the task as a daunting but stimulating challenge. The present translation, for the first time in any language, is complete, for the sake of the integrity of the text and in order not to distort its actual character, which reflects the author’s character, as far as we can know it. Abū l-ʿAlāʾ is not first-and-foremost a storyteller: he is a satirist, a moralist, and a philologist who, in his physical blindness and linguistic insight, lives in a universe of language to such an extent that one could even say that, in addition to the two or three “prisons” mentioned above, he also lived in the admittedly very spacious prison of the Arabic language. It was a prison in which he felt at home like no other. The reader should be warned that The Epistle of Forgiveness is not exactly an easy read; but the philological passages can be skipped by impatient readers.

      Telling a story could be done in a simple, unadorned style. The stories in al-Faraj baʿd al-Shiddah (Relief after Distress) by al-Muḥassin al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994), for instance, are written in a relatively plain Arabic, and so are innumerable anecdotes and stories in various collections and anthologies. However, the aim of epistolary prose, in al-Maʿarrī’s time, was not always primarily to express one’s meaning clearly: that would be paramount to an insult, as if the recipient could only understand plain speech. One ought to employ a flowery style, rich in metaphors, allusions, syntactical and semantic parallelism, recondite vocabulary, and above all sajʿ or rhymed prose, usually in the form of paired rhyme (aabbccdd . . .). Such an ornate style is found especially in preambles of letters and books, and in descriptive, “purple” passages, or on any occasion where the author wishes to display his erudition and stylistic prowess. Already in al-Maʿarrī’s lifetime interesting experiments had been done to introduce sajʿ into narrative prose texts continuously rather than on specific occasions, Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008) being a pioneer in this field, as the “inventor” of the maqāmah genre.

Al-Maʿarrī, in Part One of his Epistle, does not use sajʿ throughout but only at certain points. Since it is such a characteristic and striking element of classical Arabic prose, it has been imitated in the translation, at the risk of sounding somewhat quaint.⁵¹ The same has not been done, except very occasionally, in the translation of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle; likewise, the frequency of sajʿ in Part Two of Risālat al-Ghufrān will make it impossible to imitate it in English. The reader should be aware that many a strange expression could have been caused by an Arabic rhyme; as Nicholson says, perhaps too harshly, “Abū’l-ʿAlā seldom escapes from his artificial prose with its forced metaphors and tyrannous rhymes.”⁵² Often, especially in Part Two, he is not content with ordinary rhyme but employs the “rich rhyme” that also marks the poems in his Luzūmiyyāt. Where al-Maʿarrī uses an obscure word, the translation also uses an unusual English word, if possible. Fidelity to the text therefore overrides readability at times. The translators have stayed as close as possible to the Arabic text and have never resorted, unlike predecessors such as Brackenbury, Meïssa, and Monteil, to summary, large-scale paraphrase, and blatant glossing over difficulties by simple omission (Brackenbury and Meïssa cannot be blamed for this, since they relied on Kaylānī’s edition, which leaves out everything that is difficult or obscure). Some concessions to English style and usage had to be made, of course. Thus we have not hesitated to make pronouns (the ubiquitous and often confusing “he,” “him,” and “his” of Arabic narrative) explicit in order to make it clear who or what is meant, wherever this seemed desirable. Very often, when al-Maʿarrī refers to Ibn al-Qāriḥ, we have rendered “he” as “the Sheikh.” Al-Maʿarrī’s language is difficult and not all problems have been solved. Arab editors and commentators can ignore them, or pretend they do not find them problematical rather than confess their ignorance (we suspect this is often the case); a translator cannot hide in the same manner. In the notes we have discussed some of our difficulties and doubts or professed our inability to understand the text.

      Many such problems are found in the poetry quoted in the text. Both epistles contain much of it, most of it by other poets, although the poems recited by the demon Abū Hadrash in Risālat al-Ghufrān are obviously by al-Maʿarrī himself. Classical Arabic poetry always rhymes (normally with “monorhyme”: aaaaaa . . .), but our translations, with very few exceptions, do not use rhyme, which would normally be incompatible with accuracy; instead of the Arabic quantitative meters (not unlike those of ancient Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit) a loose English meter (e.g., iambic) has generally been chosen. In view of the difficulties of many verses and the fact that they do not contribute to the bare narrative, it is not surprising that all earlier translators drastically cut the verse. Needless to say, in the present translation nothing has been cut.

The two translators have collaborated closely. The English text of the translation, annotation, and introduction, was made by van Gelder, who was helped, in varying degrees, by predecessors such as Nicholson, Brackenbury, Meïssa, Dechico, and Monteil,⁵³ by Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s excellent annotation, by Schoeler’s published, partial, German translation, and by his unpublished rough draft of the complete German translation of Part One. Van Gelder’s drafts were thoroughly revised by Schoeler and difficulties were discussed in frequent and fruitful email exchanges. The final English version was polished by two native speakers, Sheila Ottway and especially James Montgomery, our project editor at LAL. Translations from the Qurʾan are by van Gelder; they are marked by angle brackets (French quotation marks) to distinguish them from other quotations, just as in Arabic they are customarily given in special decorative “bow brackets.” English and Arabic titles of the various chapters have been added.

      After the completion of Part One, the translators were made aware of a new translation into Italian of Part One, by Martino Diez, who kindly sent a copy. Unlike its predecessors, it is virtually complete and includes the various digressions on grammar, lexicon, and prosody; it is provided with informative notes. We could make only limited use of this excellent translation.

      A Note on the Edition

Reynold A. Nicholson may have been the pioneer in studying The Epistle of Forgiveness and making scholars acquainted with it, but the towering figure in the field is without question the Egyptian scholar ʿĀʾishah ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (1913–98), who named herself Bint al-Shāṭiʾ (“Daughter of the Riverbank”⁵⁴), and whose doctoral dissertation at the University of Cairo in 1950 became the basis for the first scholarly edition of the epistles by al-Maʿarrī and Ibn al-Qāriḥ. Her richly annotated edition, a monument of scholarship, appeared in 1954 (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif) and was republished several times with minor revisions. For the present bilingual edition it was decided not to duplicate her efforts, but to rely for the most part on her edition. The ninth edition that appeared in Cairo in 1993 forms the basis of the Arabic text offered here; we have also used some of her earlier editions, notably the third (Cairo, 1963) and fourth (Cairo, n.d.), because even though the later edition corrects some mistakes and inaccuracies, some new typographical errors have crept in occasionally. Furthermore, we have consulted other printed editions, all of them uncritical. Nicholson’s articles contain only selected parts of the Arabic text. The oldest of these printed texts is that by Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Hindiyyah, 1903); rather fully voweled, the edition is devoid of annotation and does not contain Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter. Kāmil Kaylānī, in an undated volume published in Cairo (Dār al-Maʿārif) in 1943, entitled Risālat al-Ghufrān li-l-shāʿir al-faylasūf Abī l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (The Epistle of Forgiveness by the poet-philosopher Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī), offered a shortened version of the epistles of Ibn al-Qāriḥ and al-Maʿarrī, stripped of most of the difficult passages, together with much relevant and sometimes irrelevant annotation and a selection of other epistles by al-Maʿarrī. Later editions, all СКАЧАТЬ