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The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10

R >> Richard F. Burton >> The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10







B.--The Verse.



The Shi'r or metrical part of The Nights is considerable
amounting to not less than ten thousand lines, and these I could
not but render in rhyme or rather in monorhyme. This portion has
been a bugbear to translators. De Sacy noticed the difficulty of
the task (p. 283). Lane held the poetry untranslatable because
abounding in the figure Tajnis, our paronomasia or paragram, of
which there are seven distinct varieties,[FN#433] not to speak of
other rhetorical flourishes. He therefore omitted the greater
part of the verse as tedious and, through the loss of measure and
rhyme, "generally intolerable to the reader." He proved his
position by the bald literalism of the passages which he rendered
in truly prosaic prose and succeeded in changing the facies and
presentment of the work. For the Shi'r, like the Saj'a, is not
introduced arbitrarily; and its unequal distribution throughout
The Nights may be accounted for by rule of art. Some tales, like
Omar bin al-Nu'man and Tawaddud, contain very little because the
theme is historical or realistic; whilst in stories of love and
courtship as that of Rose-in-hood, the proportion may rise to
one-fifth of the whole. And this is true to nature. Love, as
Addison said, makes even the mechanic (the British mechanic!)
poetical, and Joe Hume of material memory once fought a duel
about a fair object of dispute.

Before discussing the verse of The Nights it may be advisable to
enlarge a little upon the prosody of the Arabs. We know nothing
of the origin of their poetry, which is lost in the depths of
antiquity, and the oldest bards of whom we have any remains
belong to the famous epoch of the war Al-Basus, which would place
them about A.D. 500. Moreover, when the Muse of Arabia first
shows she is not only fully developed and mature, she has lost
all her first youth, her beaute du diable, and she is assuming
the characteristics of an age beyond "middle age." No one can
study the earliest poetry without perceiving that it results from
the cultivation of centuries and that it has already assumed that
artificial type and conventional process of treatment which
presages inevitable decay. Its noblest period is included in the
century preceding the Apostolate of Mohammed, and the oldest of
that epoch is the prince of Arab songsters, Imr al-Kays, "The
Wandering King." The Christian Fathers characteristically termed
poetry Vinum Daemonorum. The stricter Moslems called their bards
"enemies of Allah"; and when the Prophet, who hated verse and
could not even quote it correctly, was asked who was the best
poet of the Peninsula he answered that the "Man of Al-Kays," i.e.
the worshipper of the Priapus-idol, would usher them all into
Hell. Here he only echoed the general verdict of his countrymen
who loved poetry and, as a rule, despised poets. The earliest
complete pieces of any volume and substance saved from the wreck
of old Arabic literature and familiar in our day are the seven
Kasidahs (purpose-odes or tendence-elegies) which are popularly
known as the Gilded or the Suspended Poems; and in all of these
we find, with an elaboration of material and formal art which can
go no further, a subject-matter of trite imagery and stock ideas
which suggest a long ascending line of model ancestors and
predecessors.

Scholars are agreed upon the fact that many of the earliest and
best Arab poets were, as Mohammed boasted himself,
unalphabetic[FN#434] or rather could neither read nor write. They
addressed the ear and the mind, not the eye. They "spoke verse,"
learning it by rote and dictating it to the Rawi, 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 Sha'ir who speaks poetry and the Rajiz 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'id ibn Masadah), to be
mere prose. Although Labid and Antar composed in iambics, the
first Kasidah or regular poem in Rajaz was by Al-Aghlab al-Ajibi
temp. Mohammed: the Alfiyah-grammar of Ibn Malik 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-
Rahman al-Khalil, i. Ahmad, i. Amru, i. Tamim al-Farahidi (of the
Farahid sept), al-Azdi (of the Azd clan), al Yahmadi (of the
Yahmad tribe), popularly known as Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Basri,
of Bassorah, where he died aet. 68, scanning verses they say, in
A.H. 170 (= 786-87). Ibn Khallikan relates (i. 493) on the
authority of Hamzah al-Isfahani 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 Misra'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 "Arkan," the stakes and stays of the tent; the syllables
were "Usul" 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 Majmu', 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 Mafruk, or disunited, when the two moved consonants are
separated by one jazmated, as "Kabla." And lastly the "Fasilah"
or intervening space, applied to the main pole of the tent,
consists of four letters.

The metres were called Buhur 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 Dairah (circles,
classes or groups of metre); and he characterised the harmonious
and stately measures, all built upon the original Rajaz, as Al-
Tawil (the long),[FN#438] Al-Kamil (the complete), Al-Wafir (the
copious), Al-Basit (the extended) and Al-Khafif (the
light).[FN#439] These embrace all the Mu'allakat and the Hamasah,
the great Anthology of Abu Tammam; but the crave for variety and
the extension of foreign intercourse had multiplied wants and Al-
Khalil deduced from the original five Dairah, 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, anapaests and similar simplifications he
invented a system of weights ("wuzun"). 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'al," in Persian "fa'ul" (U _), to the complicated
"Mutafa'ilun"(UU - U -) , anapaest + iamb. Thus the prosodist
would scan the Shahnameh of Firdausi as

Fa'ulun, fa'ulun, fa'ulun, fa'al.
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 aether,
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 Musamarah 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, to-morrow 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
Ukadh (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 Misra'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 Kasidah (elegy), other
than the Matla, the initial Bayt with rhyming distichs. The
Ghazal and Kasidah 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 ends all
the others, e g., aa + ba + ca, etc.; nor may the same assonance
be repeated, unless at least seven couplets intervene. In the
best poets, as in the old classic verse of France, the sense must
be completed in one couplet and not run on to a second; and, as
the parts cohere very loosely, separate quotation can generally
be made without injuring their proper effect. A favourite form is
the Ruba'i or quatrain, made familiar to English ears by Mr.
Fitzgerald's masterly adaptation of Omar-i-Khayyam: the movement
is generally aa + ba, but it also appears as ab + cb, in which
case it is a Kit'ah or fragment. The Murabba, tetrastichs or four
fold-song, occurs once only in The Nights (vol.i. 98); it is a
succession of double Bayts or of four lined stanzas rhyming aa +
bc + dc + ec: in strict form the first three hemistichs rhyme
with one another only, independently of the rest of the poem, and
the fourth with that of every other stanza, e.g., aa + ab + cb +
db. The Mukhammas, cinquains or pentastichs (Night cmlxiv.),
represents a stanza of two distichs and a hemistich in monorhyme,
the fifth line being the "bob" or burden: each succeeding stanza
affects a new rhyme, except in the fifth line, e.g., aaaab +
ccccb + ddddb and so forth. The Muwwal is a simple popular song
in four to six lines; specimens of it are given in the Egyptian
grammar of my friend the late Dr. Wilhelm Spitta.[FN#444] The
Muwashshah, or ornamented verse, has two main divisions: one
applies to our acrostics in which the initials form a word or
words; the other is a kind of Musaddas, or sextines, which occurs
once only in The Nights (cmlxxxvii.). It consists of three
couplets or six-line strophes: all the hemistichs of the first
are in monorhyme; in the second and following stanzas the three
first hemistichs take a new rhyme, but the fourth resumes the
assonance of the first set and is followed by the third couplet
of No. 1, serving as bob or refrain, e.g., aaaaaa + bbbaaa +
cccaaa and so forth. It is the most complicated of all the
measures and is held to be of Morisco or Hispano-Moorish origin.

Mr. Lane (Lex.) lays down, on the lines of Ibn Khallikan (i. 476,
etc.) and other representative literati, as our sole authortties
for pure Arabic, the precedence in following order. First of all
ranks the Jahili (Ignoramus) of The Ignorance, the
: these pagans left hemistichs, couplets, pieces and elegies
which once composed a large corpus and which is now mostly
forgotten. Hammad al-Rawiyah, the Reciter, a man of Persian
descent (ob. A.H. 160=777) who first collected the Mu'allakat,
once recited by rote in a seance before Caliph Al-Walid two
thousand poems of prae-Mohammedan bards.[FN#445] After the Jahili
stands the Mukhadram or Muhadrim, the "Spurious," because half
Pagan half Moslem, who flourished either immediately before or
soon after the preaching of Mohammed. The Islami or full-blooded
Moslem at the end of the first century A.H ( = 720) began the
process of corruption in language; and, lastly he was followed by
the Muwallad of the second century who fused Arabic with non-
Arabic and in whom purity of diction disappeared.

I have noticed (I Section A.) that the versical portion of The Nights
may be distributed into three categories. First are the olden
poems which are held classical by all modern Arabs; then comes
the mediaeval poetry, the effusions of that brilliant throng which
adorned the splendid Court of Harun al-Rashid and which ended
with Al-Hariri (ob. A.H. 516); and, lastly, are the various
pieces de circonstance suggested to editors or scribes by the
occasion. It is not my object to enter upon the historical part
of the subject: a mere sketch would have neither value not
interest whilst a finished picture would lead too far: I must be
contented to notice a few of the most famous names.

Of the prae-Islamites we have Adi bin Zayd al-Ibadi the
"celebrated poet" of Ibn Khallikan (i. 188); Nabighat (the full-
grown) al-Zubyani who flourished at the Court of Al-Nu'man in AD.
580-602, and whose poem is compared with the
"Suspendeds,''[FN#446] and Al-Mutalammis the "pertinacious"
satirist, friend and intimate with Tarafah of the "Prize Poem."
About Mohammed's day we find Imr al-Kays "with whom poetry
began," to end with Zu al-Rummah; Amru bin Madi Karab al-Zubaydi,
Labid; Ka'b ibn Zuhayr, the father one of the Mu'al-lakah-poets,
and the son author of the Burdah or Mantle-poem (see vol. iv.
115), and Abbas bin Mirdas who lampooned the Prophet and had "his
tongue cut out" i.e. received a double share of booty from Ali.
In the days of Caliph Omar we have Alkamah bin Olatha followed by
Jamil bin Ma'mar of the Banu Ozrah (ob. A.H. 82), who loved Azza.
Then came Al-Kuthayyir (the dwarf, ironice), the lover of
Buthaynah, "who was so lean that birds might be cut to bits with
her bones :" the latter was also a poetess (Ibn Khall. i. 87),
like Hind bint al-Nu'man who made herself so disagreeable to
Al-Hajjaj (ob. A.H. 95) Jarir al-Khatafah, the noblest of the
Islami poets in the first century, is noticed at full length by
Ibn Khallikan (i. 294) together with his rival in poetry and
debauchery, Abu Firas Hammam or Homaym bin Ghalib al-Farazdak,
the Tamimi, the Ommiade poet "without whose verse half Arabic
would be lost:"[FN#447] he exchanged satires with Jarir and died
forty days before him (A.H. 110). Another contemporary, forming
the poetical triumvirate of the period, was the debauched
Christian poet Al-Akhtal al-Taghlibi. They were followed by Al-
Ahwas al-Ansari whose witty lampoons banished him to Dahlak
Island in the Red Sea (ob. A.H. 179 = 795); by Bashshar ibn Burd
and by Yunus ibn Habib (ob. A.H. 182).

The well known names of the Harun-cycle are Al-Asma'i,
rhetorician and poet, whose epic with Antar for hero is not
forgotten (ob. A.H. 2I6); Isaac of Mosul (Ishak bin Ibrahim of
Persian origin); Al-'Utbi "the Poet" (ob. A.H. 228); Abu al-Abbas
al-Rakashi; Abu al-Atahiyah, the lover of Otbah; Muslim bin al-
Walid al-Ansari; Abu Tammam of Tay, compiler of the Hamasah (ob.
A.H. 230), "a Muwallad of the first class" (says Ibn Khallikan i.
392); the famous or infamous Abu Nowas, Abu Mus'ab (Ahmad ibn
Ali) who died in A.H. 242; the satirist Dibil al-Khuzai (ob. A.H.
246) and a host of others quos nunc perscribere longum est. They
were followed by Al-Bohtori "the Poet" (ob. A.H. 286); the royal
author Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz (ob. A.H. 315); Ibn Abbad the
Sahib (ob. A.H. 334); Mansur al-Hallaj the martyred Sufi; the
Sahib ibn Abbad, Abu Faras al-Hamdani (ob. A.H. 357); Al-Nami
(ob. A.H. 399) who had many encounters with that model Chauvinist
Al-Mutanabbi, nicknamed Al-Mutanabbih (the "wide awake"), killed
A.H. 354; Al-Manazi of Manazjird (ob. 427); Al-Tughrai author of
the Lamiyat al-'Ajam (ob. A.H. 375); Al-Hariri the model
rhetorician (ob. A.H. 516); Al-Hajiri al-Irbili, of Arbela (ob.
A.H. 632); Baha al-Din al-Sinjari (ob. A.H. 622); Al-Katib or the
Scribe (ob. A.H. 656); Abdun al-Andalusi the Spaniard (our xiith
century) and about the same time Al-Nawaji, author of the Halbat
al-Kumayt or"Race course of the Bay horse"--poetical slang for
wine.[FN#448]

Of the third category, the pieces d'occasion, little need be
said: I may refer readers to my notes on the doggrels in vol. ii.
34, 35, 56, 179, 182, 186 and 261; in vol. v. 55 and in vol.
viii. 50.

Having a mortal aversion to the details of Arabic prosody, I have
persuaded my friend Dr. Steingass to undertake in the following
pages the subject as far as concerns the poetry of The Nights. He
has been kind enough to collaborate with me from the beginning,
and to his minute lexicographical knowledge I am deeply indebted
for discovering not a few blemishes which would have been "nuts
to the critic." The learned Arabist's notes will be highly
interesting to students: mine ( SectionV.) are intended to give a
superficial and popular idea of the Arab's verse mechanism.

"The principle of Arabic Prosody (called 'Aruz, pattern standard,
or 'Ilm al-'Aruz, science of the 'Aruz), in so far resembles that
of classical poetry, as it chiefly rests on metrical weight, not
on accent, or in other words a verse is measured by short and
long quantities, while the accent only regulates its rhythm. In
Greek and Latin, however, the quantity of the syllables depends
on their vowels, which may be either naturally short or long, or
become long by position, i.e. if followed by two or more
consonants. We all remember from our school-days what a fine
string of rules had to be committed to and kept in memory, before
we were able to scan a Latin or Greek verse without breaking its
neck by tripping over false quantities. In Arabic, on the other
hand, the answer to the question, what is metrically long or
short, is exceedingly simple, and flows with stringent cogency
from the nature of the Arabic Alphabet. This, strictly speaking,
knows only consonants (Harf, pl. Huruf). The vowels which are
required, in order to articulate the consonants, were at first
not represented in writing at all. They had to be supplied by the
reader, and are not improperly called "motions" (Harakat),
because they move or lead on, as it were, one letter to another.
They are three in number, a (Fathah), i (Kasrah), u (Zammah),
originally sounded as the corresponding English vowels in bat,
bit and butt respectively, but in certain cases modifying their
pronunciation under the influence of a neighbouring consonant.
When the necessity made itself felt to represent them in writing,
especially for the sake of fixing the correct reading of the
Koran, they were rendered by additional signs, placed above or
beneath the consonant, after which they are pronounced, in a
similar way as it is done in some systems of English shorthand. A
consonant followed by a short vowel is called a "moved letter"
(Muharrakah); a consonant without such vowel is called "resting"
or "quiescent" (Sakinah), and can stand only at the end of a
syllable or word.

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