Muʿallaqāt is the plural form of Muʿallaqā or Muʿallaqah, an ode within the qasida form of poetry that was composed in the Arabian Peninsula during Al Jahiliyya, often translated as the “Age of Ignorance,” the period before Islam. Qasida was “the preeminent poetic form of the pre-Islamic tribal warrior aristocracy” as described by Suzanne Stetkevych (The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials: Pre-Islamic Arabic Golden Odes, King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra), 2020, p. 35). Nothing can be said with certainty about an oral tradition, but we have learned that these poems were collected by a rawi—a poetry collector and reciter—named Ḥammād al-Rāwiyah and were recorded in the eighth century. The work of various medieval commentators relates that these poems were written in gold or with golden-embossed ink on linen and hung upon the religious shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca in Saudi Arabia, hence the name Muʿallaqāt—the suspended poems. These commentators have disagreed about the number of poems—some argue that there are ten, while others maintain that there are only seven. The present volume offers ten of these hanging or suspended poems by several celebrated pre-Islamic poets: Imruʾ al-Qays, Ṭarafah ibn al-Abd, Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā, Labīd ibn Rabīʿah, ʿAmr ibn Kulthum, ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, al-Ḥārith ibn Ḥilliza, al-Aʿshā al-Qaysi, al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī, and ʿAbid ibn al-Abras. The poems are between 105 and 148 lines long, a range that philologists and literary commentators have discussed extensively while debating which were composed by the original poets and which were appended to the odes during their transmission. Of course, such changes are an inherent feature of the oral tradition, so that debate will remain unresolved.
Driven by sentimental appeal and scholarly quest alike, Saudi Aramco’s AlQafilah Magazine wisely decided to revisit and restore pre-Islamic poetry, a project that led to a cultural awakening and a significant contribution to world poetics. It was motivated by a pressing question: Why not translate and explicate these poems for millennial readers in the Arab world and in the West? As a scholar of comparative literature, I was overcome with joy, thinking of my students who could finally find pleasure in reading the pre-Islamic poems just as I did growing up. When teaching previous versions of the Muʿallaqāt, I had told my students studying Arabic not to be discouraged; that I, too, had to check many vocabulary words in the dictionary and that, for each poem, I still had to go back and forth between the poem, its annotations, and the meticulous footnotes provided in different editions of the Muʿallaqāt. I have never claimed mastery of the poems’ exquisite language, nor will I. Likewise, expecting students to develop a complete understanding of any of the Muʿallaqāt is nearly impossible; it would be akin to asking a middle-schooler to read and appreciate the Old English of Beowulf or any other text that requires a thorough knowledge of medieval language and its challenging lexicon. While pre-Islamic poetry is revered, it is also somewhat overlooked because its complex language renders it ambiguous and unreadable for many readers. With this new translation, pre-Islamic poems may be easily incorporated into various language and literature courses, including those on translation.
The first English translation of the Muʿallaqāt was The Mo’allakat or Seven Arabian Poems (1783) by Sir William Jones. It was followed by a number of translations, the last two being the remarkable Desert Tracings (1989) by Michael Sells and The Golden Odes of Love (1997) by Desmond O’Grady, among other renderings. With the notable exception of the former Desert Tracings by Michael Sells (1989), which does not include all ten poems, no comprehensive modern English translation of these pre-Islamic odes had been published before. This new translation for millennial readers will be both timely and timeless, thanks to the efforts of Hatem Alzahrani, the book’s reviewer; Bander Alharbi, the editor-in-chief of AlQafilah Magazine; and a team of noted translators who are devoted scholars of the Arabic language and Arabic literature: Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, David Larsen, Huda J. Fakhreddine, and Kevin Blankinship.
Each nation possesses a defining cultural artifact—a cultural marvel, if you will—and for the Arabs, it is pre-Islamic poetry. It’s no surprise, then, that the Arabs are generally captivated by their own poetic history, which often braids historical events and romantic legends—these same features act as the foundation for the narratives of the pre-Islamic poets. The biographical footprints of the poets of the Muʿallaqāt became the subject of amusing debates among medieval literary historians to such an extent that when we read the story of the poet-prince, Imruʾ al-Qays, we recall Greek mythology. As Stetkevych notes, we ultimately observe that “[t]he biography of Imruʾ al-Qays, like that of most poets of the pre-Islamic period, straddles legend and history, and both the legendary and historical elements are preserved in many variant versions.” Since poetry in ancient Arabia was regarded as the highest art form and dubbed “record of the Arabs,” tribes took pride when they tapped a new poet as the next big thing, and those poets’ social status rivaled that of courageous warriors. Poets such as ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm, Al-Ḥārith ibn Ḥillizah, and Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā were celebrated among their tribesmen, while others were banished to wander with vagabonds in the desert, including Imruʾ al-Qays (d. ca. 550 C.E.), who was banished by his father, the king of a powerful tribe, because of his erotic poetry. In a twist of fate, “the news reached him of the regicide of his father at the hands of the rebellious Banū Asad,” and he uttered a line that has since become a popular idiom—“Wine today, business tomorrow!” (al- yawm al-khamr, ghadan al-ʾamr)—then spent his life avenging “his slain royal father.”1 This return to the tribe shows the powerful bond between the individual and the collective self in ancient Arabia, a bond that can be seen in other poems as well. ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād is another cavalier-poet whose story—embroiled in romance and rejection, and fueled by racial tension (his mother was a black slave-girl)—is surrounded by “a great ocean of legend,”2 as A. J. Arberry has rightfully noted. His father, who was a warrior, failed to recognize him as a legitimate son, but ʿAntarah’s courage, nobility, and love for ʿAblah immortalized him, engendering worldly tales of chivalry and romance that transcend the Arab nations.
When we read the pre-Islamic odes in this volume, we encounter terminology that is inherent to this genre, worthy of being highlighted, and adored by scholars of Arabic literature because of its relatedness to the desert and its Bedouin life. Each of the pre-Islamic poems begins with an amatory prelude which is referred to as nasīb (remembrance of the departed beloved) and these most memorable lines of the poem are staged in front of the ruins of a deserted encampment (aṭlāl). Does this new translation express the romantic prelude’s majesty and rhetorical grandeur? One of the characteristics of the prelude is that it also captures raḥīl, or the journey-quest, and depicts an inconsolable loss that is awakened by insignificant vestiges and then remains, staging a philosophical scene of death and nothingness which is translated eloquently in the contemporary rendering, beginning with the words of Imruʾ al-Qays:
Stop, my friends, and we will weep
over the memory of a loved one (p. 45).
We see the poetic path of the prelude charted by Imruʾ al-Qays, as well as the structure of the ode, mirrored by other poets. For example, Ṭarafah ibn al-ʿAbd reiterates this same scene in the opening of his Muʿallaqah:
My companions halted
their mounts above me and said:
Toughen up, don’t let this grief
do you in (p. 105).
Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā describes the ruins as faded tattoo drawings:
This faded camp of hers in Raqmatayn—
like tattoos drawn, it conjures a mirage (p. 173).
This notion of fading and absence also emerges in the prelude by Labīd ibn Rabīʿah:
Effaced are the abodes,
brief encampments and long-settled ones (p.221).
Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych examines the metaphorical connection between the ruins and tattoo drawings: “The permanence of the ruined traces, an emblem of mortality, carved ever deeper by annual rains, is likened to pens rewriting worn and ancient texts, or to a tattooer sprinkling lamp-black until the tattooed image appears” (p. 213). The prelude remains as an enduring echo of ancient memory, and of a past that can only be imagined in the universe of Muʿallaqāt, which is the predominant narrative of ancient Arabia’s history.
The poet in pre-Islamic Arabia was, in today’s terms, both a publicity agent and a spokesman for the tribe. This involved mastering poetic rhetoric as he recounted his tribe’s attributes and values to elevate its rank among other tribes. The best of the verbal arts could be seen in competitions at poetry festivals, where poets, bound to a specific system of meter and monorhyme, attempted to transcend the musical and tonal flair of other competitors. As Arberry remarks, “Poets ambitious for recognition would, it was alleged, recite their choicest compositions at an annual fair held at ʿUkaz, near Mecca—‘a sort of poetical Academy’ in Sir William Jone’s words; . . . and the poems voted worthy of the award were transcribed in letters of gold.”3 This type of competition has been reborn in Saudi Arabia as the Okaz International Prize for Arabic Poetry, which invites young Arab and Saudi poets to compete for the prestigious award and title of the poet of Okaz, although the modern competition’s focus is more on individual achievement than tribal promotion. In the pre-Islamic era competitions, the poet brought honor to his tribe and affirmed his loyalty to it by tracing its noble genealogy and recounting its glorious days, but he would also elevate himself by staging a powerful identification with the tribe’s virtues. For example, the Mu’allaqah of Labīd depicts a poor woman who is “rag-clad” and compared to “a starved she-camel”; she enters the tent, seeking refuge, and her orphan children “plunge / Into streams of flowing gravy which/my clan crowns with meat” during winter, a season of famine in the desert. This depiction prompts an effortless account of the many attributes unique to his tribe: benevolent, wise, courageous, just, and lawful. The poet and the tribe come together in such scenes of identification in most of the poems, offering us the understanding that although the poet’s unapologetic self-praise and fakhr (boasting) is about his tribe, he is also attributing the tribe’s virtues to himself.
The ancient Arabian poet was concerned with fashioning a construct, an edifice with specific techniques and formulas that were strictly followed to achieve certain poetic and cultural objectives that also extended to tribal gains. This construct became a theatrical event akin to scenes found in Greek tragedies or epics; if the purpose of Greek drama is to educate the audience on how to be a good citizen and a human, the purpose of the pre-Islamic poem is to inform us by weaving together a number of universal elements: the circle of life, the human condition, and the natural backdrop of desert wildlife. Both deploy big themes, including love, travel, conflict, and loss.
For modern readers, the polythematic poetic structure may create doubts about the pre-Islamic poet’s command of his poetic narrative, but when traced carefully, one finds a logical sequencing that animates these divisions. The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials: Pre-Islamic Arabic Golden Odes follows these thematic narratives, reading them as tableaus—visual renderings that explain the sudden shifts from themes of loss and lamentation to depictions of love and admiration of oneself and one’s own tribe, among other unexpected juxtapositions. The use of tableau-like movement within each poem helps young readers follow the poem and its themes, as exemplified in Imruʾ al-Qays’ Muʿallaqah, which is divided into “Stopping at the Ruined Abode,” “Erotic Encounters,” “The Dark Night of the Soul,” “The Horse and the Hunt,” and “Observing the Storm.” These thematic divisions, which don’t exist in the original poems, are added to diminish the sense of confusion over seemingly disconnected sections and their lack of smooth transitions. Only three poems in this translation—those by Imruʾ al-Qays, Labīd ibn Rabīʿah, and al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī—explicitly identify the polythematic structure, as each is divided into different themes which enable unfamiliar readers to follow the transitions. Regrettably, the rest of the poems do not adhere to a similar organization, even though the thematic concerns are highlighted in the brief introductions. However, this polythematic structure, with its seemingly random leaps, clearly exemplifies the literary and theoretical interrelations between the different poetic scenes, which are woven throughout the annotations.
In addition to considering the thematic concerns I have touched upon here, young students can explore and respond to other topics—including peace and war, nature, and wildlife—when reading these poems. When they studied the Mu‘allaqāt, this last theme was fascinating for my students not only because they were able to explore the biodiversity of the desert and its animals, including horses, camels, gazelles, ostriches, wild cows, and hyenas, among others, but also because they were able to examine the revered and ethical relationship between the human and the non-human other.
The translators involved in the preparation of The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials have made a remarkable contribution to Arabic and world poetics. By deploying different linguistic and rhetorical strategies, they have brought these ancient poems to general readers, and because this translation reflects the contemporary English language, at least to a certain extent, it may be particularly appealing to young readers who have previously perceived the process of understanding the treasure trove of linguistic peculiarities in these poems as challenging and cumbersome.
The translators have deftly navigated the unique pre-Islamic prosodic system, which includes rhyming syllables and a specific poetic meter. In order to regulate each poem’s movement, this rigid metrical system of lyrical couplets and their various meters were transformed into shorter lines with modern punctuation and spacing. Huda J. Fakhreddine explains her approach:
I have adopted the three-line stanza, the tercet, instead of the couplet or the quatrain adopted by previous translators. It is true that the poem’s meter, al-Baṣīt, is a long meter but here al-Aʿshā’s tone is at times playful and at times sarcastic, and thus I thought the shorter stanza is more fitting. The tercet also creates a different rhythm for the poem in English, distinguishing it from the available translations. It is an abrupt stanza, which allows for the change in tone and mood, the shift from meandering to rage, which occurs later in the poem (p. 393).
These observations on translation are useful, and readers will undoubtedly appreciate such commentary, especially for those poems that are not accompanied by insights regarding the translator’s approach.
Of course, no literary achievement is perfect, nor can it escape at least some criticism. In reading The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials: Pre-Islamic Arabic Golden Odes, one notices discrepancies between the Arabic and the English explanations, which seem to be two separate texts, even though they discuss similar key points. Perhaps it was difficult for the different scholars involved with the project to follow a consistent format. These discrepancies persist in the ways in which the individual poems are introduced and divided, as mentioned earlier. Similarly, there are other editorial remarks that could have been avoided, especially in relation to the layout and organization, and the problematic absence of footnotes and a bibliography could have been avoided by providing a helpful list of references for young readers.
In the end, the literary influence of the Muʿallaqāt cannot be overstated. Certain lines, motifs, and elements of figurative language found in these pre-Islamic poems, particularly in the amatory prelude, are hallmarks of the tradition of Arabic classical poetry and have resonated with generations of poets, including those of the millennial generation. Countless poets and readers have found both heritage and inspiration in the Muʿallaqāt, and this volume will make these poems accessible to even more young readers of Arabic and English.
