"Lament for his People" by Abid b. Al-Abras read in Arabic and English
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- Опубліковано 9 вер 2024
- In which I read yet another a Jāhilī poem in Arabic and then in English. This time it is a poem attributed to ʿAbīd b. al-Abraṣ.
Fortunately for the modern reader of Early Arabic (or, at least, fortunately for me) ʿAbīd's language is often as moving as it is difficult, the more so thanks to his most frequent subject: the disaster that befell his tribe, the Banū Asad. The nature of the disaster remains unspecified in the poems and therefore unknown to us, but judging by the evidence from the poems it would have involved some sort of attack by superior forces (presumably one of the sedentary Arab kingdoms) which left many of the Banū Asad dead, and forced most of the rest to flee much of their former territory.
The historical reality underlying the poetry is murky and probably will never be cleared up, barring an extraordinary fortuitous discovery by Arabian archaeologists. The information on ʿAbīd's life accompanying the poetry in Islamic literary compendia does not help much, as it has every sign of being based more on the poems than anything else, though it may contain some refraction of general truth about conflict with Kindite royalty.
Even admitting the qualifications which must attend any corpus which has gone through centuries of oral transmission, I see no substantive reason not to read the body of material attributed to ʿAbīd as (more or less) genuine pre-Islamic poetry. That does not definitively prove, of course, that all (or any) such early work attributed to ʿAbīd is necessarily by him. In pre-Islamic poetry, proving a positive is often much harder than proving a negative. It may well be that only a few poems are genuinely his, and that ʿAbīd as we know him is a half-archetypal figure around whose name various early poems of disparate authorship, containing a particular species of tribal lamentation, coagulated. If true, this would account for some the toponymic discrepancies that perplexed the commentators.
Erratum: the on-screen text has يحبون where I read يمشون. Didn't check to see that I had the correct MS variant when copypasted the text onto the screen.
I used to think it was impossible to translate poetry into another language without losing most of its beauty, but you proved me wrong
As an Arab myself, Arabic poetry of jahili era is the best poetry of all times,of all nations and languages. It will forever live deep inside us. Thank you man
Great job
beautiful
Abid is my name too.
Beautiful! Could you share the name of the meter?
Maybe this is just your selection, but your pre-Islamic poems often seem quite fatalistic and glum.
They often combined pride in the military accomplishments of their tribe with laments for a past that is gone for good, usually uttered at an abandoned campsite. That was the typical format.