A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou! Number Aphorisms in Classical Arabic Poetry (original) (raw)

Al-Abhath: Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, American University of Beirut (year TBD)

Abstract

In a volume of essays resulting from a conference at the American University of Beirut, Joachim Yeshaya quotes a poem by Ibn Sukkara al-Hāshimī (d. 385/995) appearing in the twenty-fifth maqāma of al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122): “Winter has come, but I have seven things I need, when due to dripping rain our business we must close: a cosy cover, cash, a kindled stove, a cup of wine, and then kebab, a lovely cunt, and clothes.” This translation by Geert Jan van Gelder conveys what one may call “the seven K’s of winter”: it mimics the alliteration of the seven Arabic words all starting with the letter kāf. The poem, as Yeshaya says, belongs to a genre called “number maxims” (Zahlensprüche) by Ernst Robert Curtius in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. In this paper, I write about such maxims in premodern Arabic poetry. They show up constantly, but a lack of interest in them and in poetic maxims in general — maybe because there are so many, or maybe because they seem trite and artificial to modern readers — belies their ubiquity and prominence. Also, scholars often look at prose when they study numbered lists, as they do with Arabic wisdom literature, even though most poetry anthologies have a whole section for ḥikma (gnomic wisdom). These facts make my paper a complement to current research. As for the maxims themselves, they appear as early as pre-Islamic times, e.g. vagabond poet Shanfarā’s “three companions — a brave heart, a bright blade, and a yellow longnecked bow,” and continue up to modern times, e.g. Iraqi-Ottoman physician Suleiman Ghazala’s maxim that “the sources of animal passion [ʿishq] are four: body, sensation, longing, and the joy of the gaze.” Given the constraints of rhyme and meter, the range of numbers in poetry is stricter than prose, normally spanning from two to eight. This makes the poetic sayings pithier and the items listed more tightly related. Often the lists have an air of finality or completeness, seeming to cover all there is to say about a topic. They span across poetic aghrāḍ (thematic intentions), from Ibn Sukkara al-Hāshimī’s witty mujūn (bawdy talk), to Andalusī poet Ibn al-Abbār’s (d. 658/1260) madḥ (praise poem) to a Ḥafṣid prince that “three things will energize you after age forty: triumph in battle, consolidation of power, and ‘manifest victory’ [fatḥ mubīn],” to the gloomy declaration of al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1057) that, “I see myself bound in three prisons, so don’t ask for ill-boding news: they are my loss of sight, my seclusion at home, and being trapped in this cursed body.” In this way, number maxims in premodern Arabic poetry are not so much a genre as a theme or posture, one that gives counsel, amuses the reader, exposes matters of the heart, and plays many other roles that show, in Christian Junge’s words, “the volatility of enumeration.”

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