It was not however a holistic medium where poems were concerned. These reports make it clear that song was a vital medium for the preservation and transmission of poetry, and for many Umayyad-era (661-750 CE) aficionados of Arabic verse it was no doubt the primary medium. Call and response, the anecdote reminds us, is one of poetry’s most basic interactive templates.Īnd then there are reports of musical performance, which abound in the lives of singers and poets as recorded in the Book of Songs of Abu ‘l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. In one 9th-century report, a woman’s recitation of a verse while on the patio of her home in Basra is answered by a passing rider, who recites the verse following. In the first place, there are reports of cases when a poem was recited aloud, whether at a courtly gathering, a scholarly one, or any number of other post-legendary occasions. Our anecdotal evidence of the transmission phase is of two kinds. This is appreciable where the commentary of later periods opens onto the “transmission phase” of a poem, in the interim between its first performance and the time it was written down. When latter-day transcripts are all we have access to, it forces us to read them in terms of the latter day.įor Arabic literature, this means reading the poetry of the 6th and 7th centuries CE in terms of its passage to the page in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries - no airless transfer, but a gradual scholarly and scribal reception of lively recitation and performance traditions. This is true of pre-Islamic poetry in Arabic, and a lot of early Islamic-era poetry as well. Some poems are only written down after whole centuries of oral transmission, though, making their original contexts hard to reconstruct. The experiences and expectations of a poem’s early hearers are always important to wonder about, even when they are not possible to discover. To read the poetry of the past on its own terms is a worthwhile aim. (NB: David, among the many accomplishments of this piece, has also set a script for future guest-posters, if you would like to join the ranks, get at me!)
So, without further ado, I present David’s incredible work here. Diddy (Sean “Diddy” Combs? Puff Daddy? Puffy? You get it.). Blige, who has been dubbed “Queen of Ghetto Love” by none other than P. Who better to compare him with, David asks, than Mary J. Below you’ll find a guest-post by a friend and colleague, David Larsen, offering a translation and analysis of a poem by Abū Ṣakhr al-Hudhalī, an Umayyad-era poet with a serious knack for straightforward, painfully direct love lyric. Hi Everyone, I’m returning after a (long, too long) respite to bring you something new and exciting.