Review of 'Writing the Twilight' by Nizar. F. Hermes. (original) (raw)
Related papers
This paper explores representations of old age in the poetry of Ibn Ḥamdīs (444-527/1056(444-527/ -1133. It shows how the poet, while adhering to a codified aesthetics, creatively reworked specific sub-genres of the "qaṣīda" into a personal 'poetics of ageing'. It is my contention that Ibn Ḥamdīs built such a poetics on binary constructions which parallel bodily deterioration with the collapse of social cohesion and the political decline of Islam in the West. The first part of the paper focuses on form. I discuss Ibn Ḥamdīs' usage of the theme of "aš-šayb wa 'š-šabāb" within a multipartite ode, showing how, according to an established tradition, the poet used canonical motifs of old age poetry as transitional segments, enhancing the poem's conceptual unity. The second part of the paper focuses on selected verses of nostalgia for the homeland ("al-ḥanīn ilà 'l-awṭān"), elegies ("riṯāʽ") and ascetic poems ("zuhd"). These sub-genres are read in conjunction in order to formulate a preliminary definition of Ibn Ḥamdīs' own 'poetics of ageing'.
Introduction: a Poetics of Ageing
The Poetics of Ageing: Writing the Twilight in Medieval Sicily and al-Andalus
From back aches to impotence, myopia to mid-life crises, hair dyes to walking sticks, nostalgia to dementia, scarcely has any aspect of getting old been left untouched by medieval Arabic poets.
Samira Aghacy, Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel, Edinburgh University Press, 2020; pp. 186
Cairo Studies in English
Samira Aghacy's Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel (2020; paperback 2022) offers an original study of the representations of old age and ageing in modern Arab novels. The author opens her book with an introductory chapter in which she points out the scarcity of research devoted to old age in the Arabo-Islamic world in general, and particularly to ageing as represented in works of fiction. In addition to explaining the theoretical framework and methodological approach, the Introduction offers an informed definition of ageing, taking into consideration the biological, mental, and social dimensios of the process. It then situates the study within a socio-cultural context, while at the same time exposing the limitations of the "essentialist model" which tends to consider ageing "biologically determined" and "views older individuals as an undifferentiated, homogenour group, with identical needs and interests" (2). The study, instead, problematises ageing and its literary representations, adopting the notion of "Janus-faced old age", combining both decline and well-being (4); while addressing it in terms of the personal perceptions of the ageing body set in contrast to the social identity of old age, affected by culture, religion, tradition, family, and gender. The analysis covers fifteen texts (published in Arabic, some of which have been translated into English) written across three decades, and hence represents the socio-cultural manifestations and transformations that have affected a diversified Arab ageing population. The book is divided into five chapters in addition to an introduction and conclusion. The "Introduction" identifies the book as "a first critical attempt to look at fictional works written by Arab male and female writers through the lens of ageing. It centres on ageing as it is understood, practiced and problematised in the modern Arabic novel" (15). Aghacy admits that
Asymptote, 2023
Working within the vast world of Arabic poetry, writer, translator, and professor Huda J. Fakhreddine has done much to elucidate the movements of literary forms throughout history, the necessity of constantly interacting with tradition, and the inner universe of poems as they communicate and exchange with one another. Through her extensive knowledge and sensitivity to the capacities of poetic language, Fakhreddine has demonstrated powerfully that, as in a piece by her father that she translated: "Poetry is the deepest sea, distant yet more urgent than surf breaking on rocks." Here, in this wide-ranging interview, Alton Melvar M Dapanas speaks to her on the importance of form and meter, the necessity of removing Arabic poetry from reductive study, the ongoing engagement of reading and translation, and the intimate way she came to love and feel safe in the world of a poem. Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Certain paradoxes and ironies made an impression in me after reading your latest book, The Arabic Prose Poem (https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-arabic-prose-poem.html) (2021): that the Arabic free verse, or the qasīdat al-tafīla, is not "free" in the way of its Anglophone (free verse) and Francophone (vers libre) counterparts, and that Arabic free verse poets like Nāzik al-Malāʾika and later on, Ahmad ʿAbd al-Muʿtī Hijāzī, are, surprisingly, the fiercest opponents of the prose poem. Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): Meter is the marker of poetry in the Arabic tradition, even if symbolically and not fundamentally. It is the fence that separates poetry from other forms-even those that have strong claims to the poetic. The modernist movement of the 20th century was the first organized and theorized effort to jump the fence of meter; this doesn't mean that the fence was not jumped before, only that it was not done so in such a collective and deliberate manner. The Arabic free verse poem was the result of that formal experimentation or innovation. But a more accurate label than "free verse" is qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla. The tafʿīla is the single foot or metrical unit, and a pattern of tafʿīlas makes up a meter in classical prosody. The modern poets no longer committed to the meters in their full patterns, but simplified them or reduced them to their building units (the individual tafʿīla), and often in qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla, the poem is built on a single metrical unit and its variations. The term free verse (al-shiʿr al-ḥurr) is thus confusing and not very accurate, since such poems still adhere to metrical considerations. The use of the term free verse is a testament to the influence of translation in the formative years of the Arabic modernist movement-though, as I argue in the book, translation was not that most decisive influence. I think the conversation with the Arabic poetic tradition, even when antagonistic and fraught, is really at the core of that movement, and is the real springboard to its most significant contributions. This is also why the term qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla is the most reflective of the movement's intervention in form and its thinking about the role of meter.
Oriente Moderno, 2021
This article focuses on the image of the past in two translations produced in the contexts of the Arab Nahḍah and of the Italian Risorgimento. The first translation is the Italian rendering of ʿOmar ibn al-Fāriḍ's mystical poems, published in 1872 by Pietro Valerga (1821-1903). The second is the Arabic translation of the Iliad, published in 1902 by Sulaymān al-Bustānī (1856-1925). Both translators refer to the past as a translation strategy: Pietro Valerga reads Ibn al-Fāriḍ through the verses of Petrarch and, in his work's introduction, emphasizes the transmission of medieval Arab poetry to Italy; Sulaymān al-Bustānī reconstructs the world of the Iliad through Arabic poetic tradition and compares Greece to the ǧāhiliyyah (pre-Islamic age). The article sheds light on the potential of translation as a space of re-imagination of the past and invites us to read the works as two distinct, yet akin, attempts to express original interpretations of Italian and Arabic literary histories based on syncretism and cross-cultural translatability.
This study is a historical-analytical attempt to demonstrate the influence and contribution of Arab Islamic Mawashahat and Zajal on the Provencal lyrical poets – the Troubadours that sprang in south of France during the eleventh century. The study consists of three parts in which the first part represents the main part. It sheds light on the influence of Muwashashah and Zajal on the poetry of troubadours. The second part deals with the nature of troubadours and their relation with the poetry of Muwashashah and Zajal. It is supported with five troubadour poets. The last part goes back to the beginning of the European Renaissance in the twelfth century. The European Renaissance started in Italy decades after translations of Islamic heritage, literature and science from Arabic into Latin then from Latin to other European languages. The eighth through the eleventh centuries witnessed the glorious ages of Islamic civilization and sciences in which great portion of it was shifted t o Italy during and after the crusades. Thence, different parts of Europe were enlivened with the movement of translation and multi travels and cultural exchange. One of the changing factors is poetry as a branch of literature.
Longing for Granada in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetry
Al-Masāq, 2014
While a great many studies have dealt with medieval poetry, they have failed to discuss the poetry of longing (ḣanīn) as a separate genre, independent of other genres, especially elegies (in particular poems that lament the fate of cities) and poems of salvation and lament. Nor has any study so far undertaken a comparison between works of this genre by Muslim and by Jewish poets. In this article, we shall discuss the growth of the poetry of longing in Muslim Spain and provide a number of examples of verses composed by Muslim and Jewish poets who were born in the cities of Andalusia and shared a common fate: many of them were persecuted for a variety of reasons and forced into a life of wandering and exile, and suffered banishment, imprisonment and torture. The ways they expressed their longing for their native cities possessed similarities but also differences, depending on the way each such poet perceived the land of the west and the scenes of his native city. The differences were particularly marked with respect to the way Jewish poets viewed the cities in which they had been born.