This paper demonstrates the importance of short forms — couplets, triplets and quatrains — in the work of the Abbasid poet Ibn al-Muʿtazz (861-908) and highlights the key role he played in the proliferation of the two-liner. It discusses the scholarly editions of his dīwān, offers statistical data regarding the frequency of the various short forms and comments on the arrangement of the poems in his dīwān. The discussion of a highly selective sample of couplets and triplets shows how epigrammatic expression blurred the generic identity of short poems.
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See van Gelder, “Pointed and Well-Rounded”, 101-2. Anthologists and adab-writers usually quoted single lines, short fragments or abridged poems, which could subsequently be mistaken for entire ones. The critics, on the other hand, normally focused on single lines and have therefore been criticized by modern scholars for their indifference or inability to consider poems as wholes: see W. Heinrichs, “Literary Theory: The Problem of Its Efficiency,” in Arabic Poetry: Theory and Development, Third Giorgio Levi Della Vida Conference: 1971, University of California, Los Angeles, ed. G.E. von Grunebaum (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1973), 19-69; G.J.H. van Gelder, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden: Brill 1982). The role of adab literature in the preservation and at the same time the splintering and shattering of the work of minor Abbasid poets has been discussed by B. Najar in his La mémoire rassemblée: Poètes arabes “mineurs” des IIe/VIIIe et IIIe/IXe siècles: Approche confrontative et évaluative du corpus (Clermont-Ferrand: La Française d’édition et d’imprimerie, 1987), 154-5, 165-74.
G.J. van Gelder, “Brevity: The Long and the Short of it in Classical Arabic Literary Theory,” in Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, ed. R. Peters (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 78-88, 79.
M.D. Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Geometres (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003), 22-31.
cf. G. Schoeler, “Die Einteilung der Dichtung bei den Arabern,” ZDMG 123 (1973): 9-55, 45-7. For reasons that will become clear in what follows, note the exact headings of the ten sections: al-faḫr; al-ġazal; al-madḥ wa-t-tahānī; al-hijāʾ wa-ḏ-ḏamm [in Šarīf: al-hijāʾ]; aš-šarāb; al-muʿātabāt; aṭ-ṭaradīyāt; al-awṣāf wa-l-mulaḥ [in Šarīf: al-awṣāf wa-ḏ-ḏamm wa-l-mulaḥ]; al-marāṯī wa-t-taʿāzī [in Šarīf: ar-riṯāʾ]; az-zuhd wa-l-ādāb wa-š-šayb wa-l-ḥikma. Despite the minor differences in the phrasing of the headings in the two editions, the same genres are intended.
See Wagner, Abū Nuwās, 287-8; Abū Nuwās’ dīwān (ed. Wagner), 2:320-3. As is clear from its last hemistich (only in B!), in S966/20=B2/143/20.5 Ibn al-Muʿtazz gives a detailed description of a horse which he keeps for races. This urjūza too, it seems, is in the tradition of Abū Nuwās’ depictions of racing animals. See also S1132=B2/276/3 (on racing horses).
B. Reinert, “Der Vierzeiler,” in Orientalisches Mittelalter, ed. W.P. Heinrichs [et al.], Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, Bd. 5 (Wiesbaden: AULA-Verlag, 1990), 284-300, 284.
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This paper demonstrates the importance of short forms — couplets, triplets and quatrains — in the work of the Abbasid poet Ibn al-Muʿtazz (861-908) and highlights the key role he played in the proliferation of the two-liner. It discusses the scholarly editions of his dīwān, offers statistical data regarding the frequency of the various short forms and comments on the arrangement of the poems in his dīwān. The discussion of a highly selective sample of couplets and triplets shows how epigrammatic expression blurred the generic identity of short poems.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 380 | 98 | 22 |
Full Text Views | 67 | 7 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 51 | 16 | 0 |