Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DIWAN OF ABU'L-ALA ***
Edited by
L. CRANMER-BYNG
Dr. S. A. KAPADIA
By
HENRY BAERLEIN
Second Edition
DEDICATION
TO DR. E. J. DILLON
Now the book is finished, so far as I shall finish it. There is,
my friend, but this one page to write. And, more than probably,
this is the page of all the book that I shall never wish to blot.
Increasing wisdom or, at any rate, experience will make me frown,
I promise you, some time or other at a large proportion of the
pages of this volume. But when I look upon your name I hear a
troop of memories, and in their singing is my happiness.
When you receive this book, presuming that the Russian Censor
does not shield you from it, I have some idea what you will do.
The string, of course, must not be cut, and you will seriously
set about the disentangling of it. One hand assists by holding
up, now near the nose now farther off, your glasses; the other
hand pecks at the string. After, say, twenty minutes there will
enter the admirable Miss Fox--oh! the tea she used to make for us
when we were freezing on the mountains of Bulgaria, what time our
Chicagoan millionaire was ruffled and Milyukov, the adventurous
professor, standing now not far from Russia's helm, would always
drive ahead of us and say, with princely gesture, that if we
suffered from the dust it was advisable that he should be the one
to meet the fury of the local lions. But do not let us lose the
scent: Miss Fox, that woman of resource, will cut the string. And
later on, while to her you are dictating things political and
while your other secretary is discoursing music, mournful Russian
music, then with many wrinkles on your brow you will hold the
book at arm's length.
"The Serbonian Bog," says Miss Fox, repeating the last lines of
the dictation.
There his boat, eleven years ago, was sailing underneath a net of
stars and he was talking to a fellow-traveller. They had been
joined at first by common suffering,--and how shall mortals find
a stronger link? On board that boat there was an elderly
American, the widow of a senator's brother-in-law, whose mission
was, she took it, to convert those two. What specially attracted
her to them was not, perhaps, that they excelled the other
passengers in luridness, but that they had the privilege of
understanding, more or less, her language.
She said, and let us hope with truth, that recently a Chinaman,
another object of her ministrations, had addressed her as "Your
honour, the foreign devil." And this caused her to discuss the
details of our final journey--in the meantime we have taken many
others of a more delightful sort--and she assured us that we
should be joined by Chinamen and all those Easterners. She had
extremely little hope for any of them, and Abu'l-Ala, the Syrian
poet, whom Dr. Dillon had been putting into English prose,--
Abu'l-Ala she steadily refused to read. Nor did the prospect of
beholding him in English verse evoke a sign of joy upon her
countenance. "Oh," she exclaimed, "what good is it?" And there is
naught for me to say but "Feci quod potui, faciant meliora
potentes."
H. B.
CONTENTS
APPENDIX
EDITORIAL NOTE
L. CRANMER-BYNG.
S. A. KAPADIA.
NORTHBROOK SOCIETY,
158, PICCADILLY, W.
An effort has been made to render in this book some of the poems
of Abu'l-Ala the Syrian, who was born 973 years after Jesus
Christ and some forty-four before Omar Khayyam. But the life of
such a man--his triumph over circumstance, the wisdom he
achieved, his unconventionality, his opposition to revealed
religion, the sincerity of his religion, his interesting friends
at Baghdad and Ma'arri, the multitude of his disciples, his
kindliness and cynic pessimism and the reverence which he
enjoyed, the glory of his meditations, the renown of his
prodigious memory, the fair renown of bending to the toil of
public life, not to the laureateship they pressed upon him, but
the post of being spokesman at Aleppo for the troubles of his
native villagers,--the life of such a one could not be told
within the space at our command; it will, with other of his
poems, form the subject of a separate volume. What appears
advisable is that we should devote this introduction to a
commentary on the poems here translated; which we call a "diwan,"
by the way, because they are selected out of all his works. A
commentary on the writings of a modern poet is supposed to be
superfluous, but in the days of Abu'l-Ala of Ma'arri you were
held to pay the highest compliment if, and you were yourself a
poet, you composed a commentary on some other poet's work.
Likewise you were held to be a thoughtful person if you gave the
world a commentary on your own productions; and Abu'l-Ala did not
neglect to write upon his _Sikt al-Zand_ ("The Falling Spark of
Tinder") and his _Lozum ma la Yalzam_ ("The Necessity of what is
Unnecessary"), out of which our diwan has been chiefly made. But
his elucidations have been lost. And we--this nobody will
contradict--have lost the old facility. For instance, Hasan ibn
Malik ibn Abi Obaidah was one day attending on Mansur the
Chamberlain, and he displayed a collection of proverbs which Ibn
Sirri had made for the Caliph's delectation. "It is very fine,"
quoth Mansur, "but it wants a commentary." And Hasan in a week
returned with a commentary, very well written, of three hundred
couplets. One other observation: we shall not be able to present
upon these pages a connected narrative, a dark companion of the
poem, which is to the poem as a shadow to the bird. A mediaeval
Arab would have no desire to see this theory of connection put in
practice--no, not even with a poem; for the lines, to win his
admiration, would be as a company of stars much more than as a
flying bird. Suppose that he produced a poem of a hundred lines,
he would perchance make fifty leaps across the universe. But if
we frown on such discursiveness, he proudly shows us that the
hundred lines are all in rhyme. This Arab and ourselves--we
differ so profoundly. "Yet," says he, "if there existed no
diversity of sight then would inferior merchandise be left
unsold." And when we put his poem into English, we are careless
of the hundred rhymes; we paraphrase--"Behold the townsmen," so
cried one of the Bedawi, "they have for the desert but a single
word, we have a dozen!"--and we reject, as I have done, the
quantitative metre, thinking it far preferable if the metre sings
itself into an English ear, as much as possible with that effect
the poet wants to give; and we oppose ourselves, however
unsuccessfully, to his discursiveness by making alterations in
the order of the poem. But in this commentary we shall be obliged
to leap, like Arabs, from one subject to another. And so let us
begin.
And where is now the lord of Hadr, he that built it and laid
taxes on the land of Tigris?
A house of marble he established, whereof the covering was
made of plaster; in the galbes were nests of birds.
He feared no sorry fate. See, the dominion of him has departed.
Loneliness is on his threshold.
"Consider how you treat the poor," said Dshafer ben Mahomet, who
pilgrimaged from Mecca to Baghdad between fifty and sixty times;
"they are the treasures of this world, the keys of the other."
Take care lest it befall you as the prince (_quatrain_ 69) within
whose palace now the wind is reigning. "If a prince would be
successful," says Machiavelli, "it is requisite that he should
have a spirit capable of turns and variations, in accordance with
the variations of the wind." Says an Arab mystic, "The sighing of
a poor man for that which he can never reach has more of value
than the praying of a rich man through a thousand years." And in
connection with this quatrain we may quote Blunt's rendering of
Zohair:
Would we write our names so that they endure for ever? There was
in certain Arab circles a heresy which held that the letters of
the alphabet (_quatrain_ 101) are metamorphoses of men. And
Magaira, who founded a sect, maintained that the letters of the
alphabet are like limbs of God. According to him, when God wished
to create the world, He wrote with His own hands the deeds of
men, both the good and the bad; but, at sight of the sins which
men were going to commit, He entered into such a fury that He
sweated, and from His sweat two seas were formed, the one of salt
water and the other of sweet water. From the first one the
infidels were formed, and from the second the Shi'ites. But to
this view of the everlasting question you may possibly prefer
what is advanced (_quatrains_ 103-7) and paraphrased as an
episode: Whatever be the wisdom of the worms, we bow before the
silence of the rose. As for Abu'l-Ala, we leave him now
prostrated (_quatrain_ 108) before the silence of the rolling
world. It is a splendour that was seen by Alfred de Vigny:
Footnotes
II
The scarlet eyes of Morning are pursued
By Night, who growls along the narrow lane;
But as they crash upon our world the twain
Devour us and are strengthened for the feud.
III
IV
VI
VII
VIII
IX
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
For as a gate of sorrow-land unbars
The region of unfaltering delight,
So may you gather from the fields of night
That harvest of diviner thought, the stars.
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
XLIV
XLV
XLVI
XLVII
XLVIII
XLIX
LI
LII
LIII
LV
LVI
LVII
LVIII
LIX
LX
LXI
God who created metal is the same
Who will devour it. As the warriors ride
With iron horses and with iron pride--
Come, let us laugh into the merry flame.
LXII
LXIII
LXIV
LXV
LXVI
LXVII
LXVIII
LXIX
LXX
LXXI
LXXII
LXXIII
LXXIV
LXXV
LXXVII
LXXVIII
LXXIX
LXXX
LXXXI
LXXXII
LXXXIII
LXXXIV
LXXXV
LXXXVI
LXXXVII
LXXXVIII
LXXXIX
XC
XCII
XCIII
XCIV
XCV
XCVI
XCVII
XCVIII
Heigho! the splendid air is full of wings,
And they will take us to the--friend, be wise
For if you navigate among the skies
You too may reach the subterranean kings.
XCIX
CI
CII
CIII
CIV
CV
CVI
CVII
CVIII
CIX
APPENDIX
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DIWAN OF ABU'L-ALA ***
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