The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 10 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (essential reading TXT) 📖

learning it by rote and dictating it to the R�wi, and this reciter again transmitted it to the musician whose pipe or zither accompanied the minstrel’s song. In fact the general practice of writing began only at the end of the first century after The Flight.

The rude and primitive measure of Arab song, upon which the most complicated system of metres subsequently arose, was called Al-Rajaz, literally “the trembling,” because it reminded the highly imaginative hearer of a pregnant she-camel’s weak and tottering steps. This was the carol of the camel-driver, the lover’s lay and the warrior’s chaunt of the heroic ages; and its simple, unconstrained flow adapted it well for extempore effusions. Its merits and demerits have been extensively discussed amongst Arab grammarians, and many, noticing that it was not originally divided into hemistichs, make an essential difference between the Sh�‘ir who speaks poetry and the R�jiz who speaks Rajaz. It consisted, to describe it technically, of iambic dipodia (U-U-), the first three syllables being optionally long or short It can generally be read like our iambs and, being familiar, is pleasant to the English ear. The dipodia are repeated either twice or thrice; in the former case Rajaz is held by some authorities, as Al-Akhfash (Sa’�d ibn M�sadah), to be mere prose. Although Lab�d and Antar composed in iambics, the first K�s�dah or regular poem in Rajaz was by Al-Aghlab al-Ajibi temp. Mohammed: the Alf�yah-grammar of Ibn M�lik is in Rajaz Muzdawij, the hemistichs rhyming and the assonance being confined to the couplet. Al-Hariri also affects Rajaz in the third and fifth Assemblies. So far Arabic metre is true to Nature: in impassioned speech the movement of language is iambic: we say “I will, I will,” not “I will.”

For many generations the Sons of the Desert were satisfied with Nature’s teaching; the fine perceptions and the nicely trained ear of the bard needing no aid from art. But in time came the inevitable prosodist under the formidable name of Abu Abd al-Rahm�n al-Khal�l, i. Ahmad, i. Amr�, i. Tam�m al-Far�hidi (of the Far�hid sept), al-Azdi (of the Azd clan), al Yahmadi (of the Yahmad tribe), popularly known as Al-Khal�l ibn Ahmad al-Basri, of Bassorah, where he died �t. 68, scanning verses they say, in A.H. 170 (= 786-87). Ibn Khallik�n relates (i. 493) on the authority of Hamzah al-Isfah�ni how this “father of Arabic grammar and discoverer of the rules of prosody” invented the science as he walked past a coppersmith’s shop on hearing the strokes of a hammer upon a metal basin: “two objects devoid of any quality which could serve as a proof and an illustration of anything else than their own form and shape and incapable of leading to any other knowledge than that of their own nature.”[FN#435] According to others he was passing through the Fullers’ Bazar at Basrah when his ear was struck by the Dak dak (Arabic letters) and the Dakak-dakak (Arabic letters) of the workmen. In these two onomapoetics we trace the expression which characterises the Arab tongue: all syllables are composed of consonant and vowel, the latter long or short as B and B ; or of a vowelled consonant followed by a consonant as Bal, Bau (Arabic) .

The grammarian, true to the traditions of his craft which looks for all poetry to the Badawi,[FN#436] adopted for metrical details the language of the Desert. The distich, which amongst Arabs is looked upon as one line, he named “Bayt,” nighting-place, tent or house; and the hemistich Misr�‘ah, the one leaf of a folding door. To this “scenic” simile all the parts of the verse were more or less adapted. The metres, our feet, were called “Ark�n,” the stakes and stays of the tent; the syllables were “Us�l” or roots divided into three kinds: the first or “Sabab” (the tent-rope) is composed of two letters, a vowelled and a quiescent consonant as “Lam.”[FN#437] The “Watad” or tent peg of three letters is of two varieties; the Majm�’, or united, a foot in which the two first consonants are moved by vowels and the last is jazmated or made quiescent by apocope as “Lakad”; and the Mafr�k, or disunited, when the two moved consonants are separated by one jazmated, as “Kabla.” And lastly the “F�silah”

or intervening space, applied to the main pole of the tent, consists of four letters.

The metres were called Buh�r or “seas” (plur. of Bahr), also meaning the space within the tent-walls, the equivoque alluding to pearls and other treasures of the deep. Al-Khalil, the systematiser, found in general use only five D�irah (circles, classes or groups of metre); and he characterised the harmonious and stately measures, all built upon the original Rajaz, as Al-Taw�l (the long),[FN#438] Al-K�mil (the complete), Al-W�fir (the copious), Al-Bas�t (the extended) and Al-Khaf�f (the light).[FN#439] These embrace all the Mu’allak�t and the Ham�sah, the great Anthology of Ab� Tamm�m; but the crave for variety and the extension of foreign intercourse had multiplied wants and Al-Khalil deduced from the original five D�irah, fifteen, to which Al-Akhfash (ob. A.D. 830) added a sixteenth, Al-Khabab. The Persians extended the number to nineteen: the first four were peculiarly Arab; the fourteenth, the fifteenth and seventeenth peculiarly Persian and all the rest were Arab and Persian.[FN#440]

Arabic metre so far resembles that of Greece and Rome that the value of syllables depends upon the “quantity” or position of their consonants, not upon accent as in English and the Neo-Latin tongues. Al-Khalil was doubtless familiar with the classic prosody of Europe, but he rejected it as unsuited to the genius of Arabic and like a true Eastern Gelehrte he adopted a process devised by himself. Instead of scansion by pyrrhics and spondees, iambs and trochees, anap�sts and similar simplifications he invented a system of weights (“wuz�n”). Of these there are nine[FN#441] memorial words used as quantitive signs, all built upon the root “fa’l” which has rendered such notable service to Arabic and Hebrew[FN#442] grammar and varying from the simple “fa’�l,” in Persian “fa’�l” (U _), to the complicated “Mutaf�‘ilun”(UU - U -) , anap�st + iamb. Thus the prosodist would scan the Shahn�meh of Firdausi as

Fa’�lun, fa’�lun, fa’�lun, fa’�l.

U - - U - - U - - -

These weights also show another peculiarity of Arabic verse. In English we have few if any spondees: the Arabic contains about three longs to one short; hence its gravity, stateliness and dignity. But these longs again are peculiar, and sometimes strike the European ear as shorts, thus adding a difficulty for those who would represent Oriental metres by western feet, ictus and accent. German Arabists can register an occasional success in such attempts: Englishmen none. My late friend Professor Palmer of Cambridge tried the tour de force of dancing on one leg instead of two and notably failed: Mr. Lyall also strove to imitate Arabic metre and produced only prose bewitched.[FN#443]

Mr. Payne appears to me to have wasted trouble in “observing the exterior form of the stanza, the movement of the rhyme and (as far as possible) the identity in number of the syllables composing the beits.” There is only one part of his admirable version concerning which I have heard competent readers complain; and that is the metrical, because here and there it sounds strange to their ears.

I have already stated my conviction that there are two and only two ways of translating Arabic poetry into English. One is to represent it by good heroic or lyric verse as did Sir William Jones; the other is to render it after French fashion, by measured and balanced Prose, the little sister of Poetry. It is thus and thus only that we can preserve the peculiar cachet of the original. This old world Oriental song is spirit-stirring as a “blast of that dread horn,” albeit the words be thin. It is heady as the “Golden Wine” of Libanus, to the tongue water and brandy to the brain—the clean contrary of our nineteenth century effusions. Technically speaking, it can be vehicled only by the verse of the old English ballad or by the prose of the Book of Job. And Badawi poetry is a perfect expositor of Badawi life, especially in the good and gladsome old Pagan days ere Al-Islam, like the creed which it abolished, overcast the minds of men with its dull grey pall of realistic superstition. They combined to form a marvellous picture—those contrasts of splendour and squalor amongst the sons of the sand. Under airs pure as �ther, golden and ultramarine above and melting over the horizon into a diaphanous green which suggested a resection of Kaf, that unseen mountain-wall of emerald, the so-called Desert, changed face twice a year; now brown and dry as summer-dust; then green as Hope, beautified with infinite verdure and broad sheetings of rain-water. The vernal and autumnal shiftings of camp, disruptions of homesteads and partings of kith and kin, friends and lovers, made the life many-sided as it was vigorous and noble, the outcome of hardy frames, strong minds and spirits breathing the very essence of liberty and independence. The day began with the dawn-drink, “generous wine bought with shining ore,” poured into the crystal goblet from the leather bottle swinging before the cooling breeze. The rest was spent in the practice of weapons, in the favourite arrow game known as Al-Maysar, gambling which at least had the merit of feeding the poor; in racing for which the Badawin had a mania, and in the chase, the foray and the fray which formed the serious business of his life. And how picturesque the hunting scenes; the greyhound, like the mare, of purest blood; the falcon cast at francolin and coney; the gazelle standing at gaze; the desert ass scudding over the ground-waves; the wild cows or bovine antelopes browsing with their calves and the ostrich-chickens flocking round the parent bird! The Mus�marah or night-talk round the camp-fire was enlivened by the lute-girl and the glee-man, whom the austere Prophet described as “roving distraught in every vale” and whose motto in Horatian vein was, “To day we shall drink, tomorrow be sober, wine this day, that day work.”

Regularly once a year, during the three peaceful months when war and even blood revenge were held sacrilegious, the tribes met at Uk�dh (Ocaz) and other fairsteads, where they held high festival and the bards strave in song and prided themselves upon doing honour to women and to the successful warriors of their tribe.

Brief, the object of Arab life was to be—to be free, to be brave, to be wise; while the endeavours of other peoples was and is to have—to have wealth, to have knowledge, to have a name; and while moderns make their “epitome of life” to be, to do and to suffer. Lastly the Arab’s end was honourable as his life was stirring: few Badawin had the crowning misfortune of dying “the straw-death.”

The poetical forms in The Nights are as follows:—The Misr�‘ah or hemistich is half the “Bayt” which, for want of a better word, I have rendered couplet: this, however, though formally separated in MSS., is looked upon as one line, one verse; hence a word can be divided, the former part pertaining to the first and the latter to the second moiety of the distich. As the Arabs ignore blank verse, when we come upon a rhymeless couplet we know that it is an extract from a longer composition in monorhyme. The Kit’ah is a fragment, either an occasional piece or more frequently a portion of a Ghazal (ode) or Kas�dah (elegy), other than the Matl�, the initial Bayt with rhyming distichs. The Ghazal and Kas�dah differ mainly in length: the former is popularly limited to eighteen couplets: the latter begins at fifteen and is of indefinite number. Both are built upon monorhyme, which appears twice in the first couplet and