The Life and Times of Abu Tammam. Abu Bakr al-Suli

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СКАЧАТЬ “Wisdom is the believer’s lost camel. Retrieve your lost camel, even from the polytheists” (§199). There are personal rivalries in the pursuit of the highest fees and the most exquisite phrasings. There is praise and insult, desire both heterosexual and homosexual. There is the flavor of date wine (§§91.1–5), the texture of fabrics, and how it felt to wear them (§§92.1–5):

      We were dressed in the garb of summer

      by a generous man whose own garb is noble and heroic deeds.

      A Sābirī gown and a tunic

      like eggshells or snakeskin,

      Like a shimmering mirage in its beauty

      but unlike its false promise.

      Finest linen, trembling in the wind

      by unknown Fate’s heeded command,

      Fluttering, as if it were ever

      the heart of a man in love or the innards of a man in fear.

      Hugging the body,

      It seems part of your ribs and elbows. (§92.2)

      In these ways, the poems and their settings afford moments of intense communication, the transmission of experience and values across cultural borders. There is indeed a real sense in which Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī’s book inserts us, as readers from another world, into the chains of personal memory and testimony by means of which the author authenticates his materials and advertises their enduring value. Listen, for example, to this sequence from the section entitled “Abu Tammām as a Source”:

      We cite Aḥmad, citing Aḥmad, citing Abū Tammām, who cites ʿAmr ibn Hāshim al-Sarawī as follows:

      We were talking at Muḥammad ibn ʿAmr al-Awzāʿī’s place […]. A Bedouin from the tribe of ʿUlaym ibn Janāb was present but did not say a word. “You have rightly been called the most taciturn of Bedouins,” we said to him. “Will you not talk to the group?”

      “One man profits from his ear,” the Bedouin replied. “The others profit from their tongue.”

      “My goodness, how brilliant!” al-Awzāʿī exclaimed.

      We cite Aḥmad, who cites Aḥmad, who cites Abū Tammām as follows:

      One man said to another, “How beautiful your speech is!”

      “You make it so by listening so beautifully.” (§§152–3)

      Let us then, in conclusion, counterbalance the triumphalist theme of Abū Tammām’s Amorium ode and prolong the theme of listening by invoking the poem that begins “Sleepless night of Abrashahr.” On a visit to the city of Abrashahr, Abū Tammām is said to have fallen for “a singer with a beautiful voice who sang in Persian.” He spent the night listening to her, even though he couldn’t understand her words:

      […] She played her strings, sorrowful and yearning; had they been able, her listeners would have given their life for her.

      I did not understand what she meant, but it set my heart on fire, for I understood her sorrow.

      All night long I was like a blind man, broken-hearted,

      In love with beauties he cannot see. (§§100.1–6)

      Reading the poem in English in the twenty-first century is like falling in love with the ghost of her song as embodied in Abū Tammām’s memory of it. He would surely have been pleased to know that both voices, hers and his, had survived close to twelve centuries of cultural conflict, change, and mutually beneficial exchange, crossing unexpected borders on the way.

      Terence Cave

       St. Johns College, Oxford

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      The author owes a debt of gratitude to the many people who helped see this volume into print, first of all to the general editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, Philip Kennedy, and the executive editors, Shawkat Toorawa and James Montgomery, for accepting this work in their series, and furthermore to my outside referees, Julia Bray and the late Wolfhart Heinrichs, for their encouraging comments and constructive criticism. It is my great regret that my Doktorvater could not see the completion of the book, to which his example as a scholar contributed so much. My style editor, David Brennan, has been a valiant support and inexhaustible source of ideas in my initial struggle to find modern English voices for al-Ṣūlī and Abū Tammām and his contemporaries. My first project editor, Tahera Qutbuddin, with her precise eye, suggested many improvements in content and form. Hugh Kennedy, Everett Rowson, and Letizia Osti generously helped me resolve puzzles in the text; my MA student Hatim Alzahrani commented on parts of the translation; Chip Rossetti kept reminding me gently but firmly that timeless scholarship has deadlines; and Gemma Juan-Simó assisted with logistical matters. I am grateful to my copy editor Allison Brown for her unfailing precision, to the digital production manager Stuart Brown for his artful Arabic typesetting, and to my Bachelor students at Freie Universität Berlin for their enthusiastic reception of a preprint draft. My special thanks go to my second project editor, James Montgomery, who chaperoned the book through its final stages and spared no effort in revising every detail from substance to style: his copious comments were always on the mark.

      To the staff of the Süleymaniye Library I say thank you for making the unicum manuscript available to me, and to Bilal Orfali for providing me with a digital copy. I thank the professional staff of Widener Library, Harvard University, for making its excellent collection available to me for research on questions that arose during the process of translation. I also owe much to those scholars who first identified this important work, Khalīl ʿAsākir, Muḥammad ʿAzzām, and Naẓīr al-Islam al-Hindī; their careful edition left me few things to correct.

      I could not have accomplished this (or any prior) book without the loving support of my parents, Lilo and Wilfried Gründler, even though for nearly three decades my work took me away from them to another continent. I complete this, having returned to their side of the Atlantic. And as literature is about life, Normand Mainville ensured that I did not forget and kept me in good spirits throughout the entire process.

      Any errors that remain are mine alone.

      Beatrice Gruendler

       Berlin, June 2015

      INTRODUCTION

      She longed to read Ulysses, and when Virginia [Woolf] produced it for her, Katherine [Mansfield] began by ridiculing it, and then suddenly said: “But theres something in this.” This scene, Virginia thought, remembering it almost at the end of her life just after Joyce’s death, “should figure I suppose in the history of literature.” ¹

      The Life and Times of Abū Tammām (Akhbār Abī Tammām) by Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī, more than any other book, illustrates the role of poetry in premodern Islamic society. Composed over ten centuries ago, it brings together two salient personalities of cultural history from one of the most dynamic periods of Arabic poetry. This is the first English translation of the work.²

      ABŪ TAMMĀM

      Abū СКАЧАТЬ