Download PDF | Tarif Khalidi - An Anthology of Arabic Literature_ From the Classical to the Modern-Edinburgh University Press (2016).
253 Pages
Introduction
An anthology such as this is a miscellany of personal choice of Arabic verse and prose, ancient and modern, encountered across some sixty years of reading in Arabic literature. It is a type of work once called a florilegium, a bouquet of choice literary extracts, and this anthology, like similar bouquets, makes no claim to typicality or wide coverage but is simply, to quote Borges, ‘a library of preferences’. It came about when certain passages produced in me what T. S. Eliot called the ‘shudder’, a sense of shock and surprise. Only the original language can of course engender this shudder but a translation that manages to convey something of the shock of the original is fortunate indeed.
My hope is that my readers will from time to time share that experience. Although the principal aim of this anthology is entertainment, and assumes no prior knowledge of Arabic literature on the reader’s part, something ought yet to be said about the language itself and its extensive cultural horizons. For about a millennium, Arabic was the lingua franca of a world civilisation stretching from Spain to the frontiers of China, and acted much like the Latin of medieval Europe. Though modern westerners associate it with Islam and Muslims, Arabic was the primary language of scholarship used also by Jews and Christians, together with the many ethnic groups who lived within the confines of that global civilisation. One distinguishing mark of Islamic cities was their cosmopolitan character, a fact often commented upon by European travellers to the east, both medieval and modern. It was largely in these globalised cities where literature flourished.
Arabic literature in the pre-modern period therefore speaks a universal language because it echoes the many diverse cultures embraced by that civilisation. Today, the Arab world is in the main a source of dramatic news and graphic images for the international media, but Arabic literature is far less familiar to western audiences. Admittedly, today’s reader is better served than ever before where translations from Arabic literature, both pre-modern and modern, are concerned. There now exist several translation series producing scores of reputable translations each year and even a few magazines devoted to Arabic literature in translation. Many Arabic novels appear in translation each year, though not much poetry. The internet is also a major source of translations, mostly from religious texts, but these are not consistently trustworthy or elegant.
There is thus, I believe, space for an anthology which, in a relatively short span, attempts to reflect the great diversity of Arabic literature across time, theme and genre, without burdening the reader with extensive notes and commentaries, an anthology that brings the Anglophone reader face to face with that literature with minimum interference from its collector. Most of the texts in this anthology have not previously been translated into English. This is because the anthology seeks to reflect, in its pre-modern section, not just the literary ‘canon’, a lot of which already exists in translation, but also the byways of that literature, most of which remain untranslated. By its byways I mean such topics as the occult, poetic fragments, heresy, psychological reflections, literary theory, sexual etiquette, humanity and nature, geographical observations and reflections on world history.
In its modern section, the anthology highlights such themes as travel writing, feminism, political dissent, newspaper editorials, personal memoirs and so forth. The anthology as a literary genre has had a long and distinguished history in Arabic literature. It acted in the beginning as the most typical illustration of the theory of adab, whose basic principle was the broad education of a gentleman. The adib, or possessor of adab, was a person who was familiar with all the religious and ‘secular’ sciences of his day and combined this broadly based knowledge with the moral character necessary to communicate that knowledge, that is the humility, generosity of spirit and integrity of a true scholar. Adab was also an avenue to advancement, not just in the scholarly sphere but in government chancelleries as well, and often in both.
The anthology was accordingly regarded as an accessible way in which one could acquire that wide curriculum of knowledge and the moral character that goes with it. Almost all anthologies carried wonderfully flowery titles evoking such images as gardens, necklaces or pearls. In more modern times, though anthologies remain very popular, the word adab itself has lost its earlier meaning of a broadly based education, and has come to mean literature in the strict sense, though it still preserves the sense of refinement and good manners. The pre-modern anthologies – those composed between, say, the ninth and sixteenth centuries ad – were multi-volume works, and always divided under general themes. The earliest anthologies had a few wide-ranging themes such as ‘Government’, ‘War’, ‘Leadership’, ‘Moral and Immoral Characteristics’, ‘Knowledge and Eloquence’, ‘The Ascetic Life’, ‘Companionship’, ‘Fulfilment of Desires’, ‘Food’, and ‘Women’. Later anthologies tended to have a more detailed table of contents, perhaps to expedite the search for particular items. But all pre-modern anthologies were heavily interspersed with poetry as if to bestow its aesthetic and authenticating coverage upon prose (poetry in many pre-modern cultures was thought to be more ‘reliable’ and ‘trustworthy’ than prose because it was less amenable to tampering), the verses being typically a few lines in length.
The anthologies were somewhat rambling and did not adhere strictly to the general theme as the anthologist tied his extracts together and occasionally wandered away from the main subject. Finally, they included short rather than long extracts, whether these were sayings, entertaining anecdotes, moral disquisitions or grammatical and lexical annotations. It is rare to find in pre-modern anthologies an extract, in verse or prose, that extends more than a few lines in length. Modern Arabic anthologies on the other hand are, like many anthologies of our modern world, built on discrete pieces of prose and/or verse of considerable length. They lack the guidance of the pre-modern anthologist who would intervene in order weave his extracts together. The present anthology is nearer in form and spirit to the pre-modern than to the modern anthology. Thus the extracts here are in their great majority short, and the reason for this is the same as the one given by those ancient anthologists: to avoid boring the reader. The principle that ‘less is more’, that is to say pithiness and concision, remained throughout the pre-modern period a common feature of Arabic literary theory. Furthermore, and also like ancient anthologies, this one is not arranged in strict chronological succession of the chosen texts since its aim is not to demonstrate evolution but to allow the reader to pick it up at any point and read it, hopefully with pleasure.
Then again, my definition of literature adheres more closely to classical adab than to literature in the strict sense. This means that the anthology includes, in addition to literary texts properly so called, extracts from philosophers, theologians and scientists since even the most difficult among them never aspired to anything less than a good style. Any adib worth his salt would be expected to have some acquaintance with the rational sciences, while the philosophers, theologians and scientists would strive to express themselves as elegantly as they could, occasionally peppering their texts with verse or proverbial wisdom in order to reach a wide audience. But one major difference with ancient anthologies is that I have not attempted to intervene or to tie together these extracts, preferring them to speak for themselves with minimum annotation from the anthologist. The beginnings of modern Arabic literature can conveniently be dated to the nineteenth century. In the course of that century, deep structural changes came over Arab societies which might best be summarised as follows.
The traditional scholars of the pre-modern period, for reasons that need not occupy us here, were giving way steadily to a new class of scholars less attached to the earlier religious curriculum and more attuned to western literary fashions and genres. The conventional ʿulamaʾ, or religious scholars, were being edged out of the republic of letters by the new professionals: the journalists, doctors, lawyers, academics, civil servants, novelists and essayists of that age. Furthermore, and in that century, Arabic lost much of its earlier universality when separate Muslim nations discovered or rediscovered their literary traditions and breathed new life into their old languages. A canon for modern Arabic literature is still in the process of formation but there can be little doubt that the carriers of that literature are a palpably new breed of scholar, the product of modern societies.
In this anthology, I wanted the extracts from modern Arabic literature to reflect, again without pretence to typicality, some of the new genres that have emerged in the last century and a half, such as the short story, the political editorial and the songs and poetry of political dissent. One last thought. For a century or more, western Arabists have produced anthologies of Arabic literature in English translation that have contributed in no small measure to popularising that literature to a general western readership. So far as I know, they have not been thoroughly studied as a literary genre; a study of them, of their strategies of selection and translation, would be an interesting contribution to scholarship.
As I gathered and translated my extracts, two recent anthologies in particular loomed above the rest: Robert Irwin’s Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (2006) and Geert Jan van Gelder’s Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology (2013). Both have valuable introductions more thoroughgoing than mine. Yet if I want this work to stand alongside these two, I should try to say something about them and how my anthology differs from theirs. Both these anthologies have a more limited coverage than mine, confining themselves to the premodern period.
Both weave their extracts together with learned commentaries which have great value to specialists and advanced students but might in some cases be off-putting to the proverbial ‘general reader’. Both include extracts far longer than mine, which may, again, be a little challenging to that reader. Irwin’s anthology is made up of extracts already translated by several hands and is thus uneven in style and diction. Van Gelder’s anthology consists of his own translations, formidably scholarly and extensively annotated and glossed, though one might raise some objections to the poetic quality of some of his renderings – as indeed one might also to my own. Having said this, however, these two volumes will remain useful and eminently worthy of consultation for many years to come and may be warmly recommended to readers of this anthology. As regards my own translations, poetry of course poses the greatest challenge. In translating Arabic poetry I did all I could to preserve the idioms, metaphors and other figures of speech in their original literal form, wishing to emphasise their distinctness, indeed their alienness. And yet, how near some of it is in spirit to other world literatures must be left to the judgement of its readers. Ohe iam satis est, ohe libelle. Tarif Khalidi American University of Beirut September 2015
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