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Poetry and Politics in Sir William Jones’s Translation of the Mu’allaqaat:
Reading Sir William Jones Reading Imru’ al-Qays
“The Indians are soft, and voluptuous, but artful and insincere, at least to the
Europeans, whom to say the truth, they have had no great reason of late years to admire
for the opposite virtues…”
—Sir William Jones, Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick
Languages, (1772), p. 198.
Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne könnt es nie erblicken.
—Goethe, “Vermischte Epigramme”
Sir William Jones published his translation of the Mu’allaqaat (or the Moâllakát,
as his Tolkien-evoking transliteration has it) in the politically significant year of 1783
(the title page reads 1782), the year the Treaty of Paris would officially end hostilities
with and confer independence on the revolting Americans, whom Jones supported. As
A.J. Arberry points out in the Preface to his translation of the Mu’allaqaat, Jones
certainly seems to have had politics in mind while he was translating the seven classic,
central qasaa’id (odes) of pre-Islamic Arabic literature. In his “arguments” to the poems
of Labīd and ‘Amr bin Kulthūm, for example, he refers to the former poet as “a genuine
patriot,” (43) certainly an evocative word in the context of the American Revolution, and
depicts ‘Amr bin Hind against whom ‘Amr bin Kulthūm rails in his qasida as a “tyrant”
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who “like other tyrants, wished to make all men just but himself, and to leave all nations
free but his own” (73). This is another evocative word, used as it was incessantly by selfproclaimed patriots to describe George III. Here we are over three long centuries later,
still hearing endless amounts about tyranny, patriotism, Arabs and heads of state named
George, and the level of interest in Arabic poetry amongst the English-speaking peoples
remains perhaps proportional to that in 1783. In these similarities between Jones and
ourselves lies the value of his translation: taking as our objects of enquiry specifically the
poem of Imru’ al-Qays, we will see that with a bit of scrutiny, Jones not only distorts and
occasionally misconstrues the Arabic from his own unique cultural position, but
(hopefully) reveals to us thereby aspects of the Arabic mostly only visible from such a
unique position.
If the cultural phenomena of Jones’s day are nominally identical to our own,
though rearranged very weirdly (his beloved America, whose liberty-loving colonists he
identified with independent-spirited Arabs, is now a world power with a George at the
helm, and funnily enough is attempting, it says, to spread liberty among the Arabs!), it
stands to reason that there is no time like the present for a critical evaluation of Jones’s
translation, though not at all to study his accuracy, since there is no question of reviving
his extremely out-of-print work. Rather, his renderings of Arabic texts are of interest
firstly because, given what we Anglophone readers of Arabic texts have in common with
him, they give us an unusual but potentially valuable perspective. Secondly, literary
studies today tends to focus on representations of what is often airily referred to as the
“colonial subject,” usually in European texts. Edward Said set this example by curiously
reproducing the problem of Orientalism, as he sees it, by not allowing any Arabic voices
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in his text. The trend continues today with studies such as Saree Makdisi’s Romantic
Imperialism, an analysis of five canonical English authors, treating things like
Wordsworth’s description of a friend’s dream of an Arab in book V of The Prelude.
This can become tedious stuff to read, by and large, since the Englishman
invariably misreads the cultural Other, but the critical text doesn’t bother to look the
Other in the face at all throughout these ventures. One occasionally feels when reading
Orientalism that, not only are the English congenitally unable to be affected by
interaction with other cultures, but that people from other cultures are so ontologically
malleable and weak that no matter what, they are unable to convey any specificity of their
presence to a European. As Said says, Orientalism “creates the Orient.” This may indeed
be mostly true – but if we read subjectivity, with Foucault, on whom Said is drawing, as
so entirely constructed by power relations that the political visibility of said subject only
renders it so much the more controllable, then at some point the entire process cancels
itself through. If the appearance of a certain subjectivity is perfectly synonymous with a
total constructedness, then one must really be seeing the thing-in-itself when one
participates in such power relations as say, the colonizer and the colonized. If there is
truly nothing behind the social construction, a naïve, essentially idealist cliché one finds
again and again among the Foucault’s English literary acolytes, then there’s really
nothing for the powerless to do except wait to be represented and thus constructed. That
is to say, those of us living in what we may call representation-rich, if not representationsaturated societies such as ours may find it sensible or even liberating to assert that the
subject is only its representation, but this sort of post-humanist logic presupposes the
surplus of representations which we enjoy.
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The corollary to these ways of thinking exists also in the very minor field of
translation studies, which today tends to emphasize the constructedness of the translation,
often making very similar statements about the “original text” to the ones one
occasionally finds about the colonial subject. This is apparent, for example, a book of
essays edited by Lawrence Venuti, which begins with a sort of mission statement that the
“collection … demonstrates the power wielded by translators in the formation of literary
canons and cultural identities, and recognises the appropriative and imperialist
movements in every act of translation.” The underlying assumption for this is bizarre:
while arguing accurately that today we tend to consider translations as derivative
products, barely constituting a genre, lacking the originality that would merit critical
analysis, at the same we are apparently always reading in Western European languages.
Would it seriously make any sense to say that there is an imperialist movement in the act
of translating Eliot into Arabic? Venuti is not actually as reductive and stupid as all that.
While writing that “a translation emerges as an active reconstitution of the foreign text
mediated by the irreducible linguistic, discursive, and ideological differences of the
target-language culture,” he also states that “comparisons of the source- and targetlanguages which explore the ratio of loss and gain between them and the translator’s
discursive strategy as well as any unforseen effects” (10). Venuti argues more from a
Derridean point of view, but this language of “discourse,” emphasizing the constructive
and creative rather than mimetic capabilities of language within power relations, remains
an inheritance from Foucault. Although he is speaking of contemporary literary studies
(not the 18th century, as we are1), Venuti insists on an ethical import to his project: “a
fluent strategy [that strives for transparent mimesis] performs a labor of acculturation
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which domesticates the foreign text, making it intelligible and even familiar to the targetlanguage reader, providing him or her with the narcissistic experience of recognizing his
or her own culture in a cultural other, enacting an imperialism that extends the dominion
of transparency with other ideological discourses over a different culture” (5). Such
comments are valid to a point, but presuppose a certain élitism: implicitly, the
monolingual reader is an imperialist reader, unless s/he learns another language or reads
some of us polyglot academicians’ literary criticism.2
The reason for all this polemic is that I would really like to move past these
models of translation and representation, out of picking apart Jones’s text in this case for
either accuracy of translation or ideological distortion, and into the poetic substance that
mediates the two languages. And Jones himself tends to be bandied about between two
extremes – in English literary studies, I mean – resulting from the sort of theoretical blind
spots I’ve been attacking. Evaluations of his work usually tend either towards the highly
laudatory, on the grounds that he is such a neglected figure in English literary studies, or
towards the highly condemnatory, on the grounds that English Arabic studies (seen as
hopelessly implicated in British imperialism) begins with him. For Said, Jones “closed
…down” the “large vistas” of Oriental prospects, “codifying, tabulating, comparing”
(77). The effect of his studies was “to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and
turn it into a province of European learning” (78). He demonstrates this facilely by
pointing out that Jones was a lawyer, and then moves on to authors he likes better.
Garland Cannon on the other hand, writes things like “Jones’s enlightened multicultural
view partly guides modern global thinking and may be his greatest legacy to the world”
(Barfoot 41). As my epigraph may suggest, Jones seemed to have some notion of cultural
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relativity, at least beyond what Said would allow him (I would also like to think that
Goethe’s little zinger has some validity as a poetic view). Both men seem somewhat to
fail to realize that history rather does what she likes with intellectuals3 — it is as
implausible to find any causal relation between Jones’s intellectual omnivorousness and
Lord Balfour’s snotty pose of omniscience, as Said does (78), as it would be to suppose
that Jones somehow affected our current views on multiculturalism, for which we
probably needed the entire history of European global expansion in order to even
conceptualize, let alone achieve.
Let us really begin then, with Jones’s notion that the Arabs are an inherently
politically independent-minded sort of people. We will not deny that Jones is here
describing the Arabs using an imagery generated out of his own political views, but
rather than argue that it represents either a projection onto or a discursive construction of
the non-European Other, I invite the reader to ask the closest Arab whether s/he likes
political independence and if so, why, and how would s/he describe this preference
differently:
the natives of Arabia [the Bedouin]… preserve to this day the manners and
customs of their ancestors, who, by their own account, were settled in the
province of Yemen above three thousand years ago; they have never been wholly
subdued by any nation; and though the admiral of Selim the First made a descent
on their coast, and exacted a tribute from the people of Aden, yet the
Arabians only keep up a show of allegiance to the sultan, and act, on every
important occasion, in open defiance of his power (1772, p. 179)
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One can tell that Jones has America half in mind when he writes of the “vast extent of
their forests.” Why would Jones have considered the poets of Arabia especially great
representatives of liberty? The answer lies in his theory of art, as well as some other
cultural considerations that merit a bit of a digression.
As Jaroslav Stetkevych explains it, Jones’s model of artistic expression occupies a
position of proto-Romanticism, straddling the area between neoclassical mimesis and a
Romantic model of subjective expression. For the former he finds a trans-cultural
moment embodied in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and Ibn Rashīq’s Al-‘Umda. The latter
is displayed in Jones’s 1772 essay, “On the arts, commonly called imitative.”
Stekevych’s comparison of these two authors in particular offers an example of thinking
of literature in “an integrative manner” (Kerr 109), by examining cultural concepts that
are plural and simultaneously universal, such as neoclassicism. What concerns us is
Jones’s assessment of the qasida as a “pastoral” form, an evaluation that Stetkevych calls
“a valid critical discovery” (108). At the basis of the evaluation is the notion that nature
and art, or artifice, proceed one to the other as a linear cultural process, and that the
product of the earlier stage is the pastoral. The interest in studying the pastoral, in fact,
derives from its capacity to represent a more primitive cultural moment. Johnson
expresses it thusly in Rasselas: “it is commonly observed that the early writers are in
possession of nature, and their followers of art: that the first excel in strength and in
invention and the latter in elegance and refinement” (qtd. in Kerr 109).
Thus, for Jones, one of the Arabs’ prime poetic virtues is their literal proximity to
nature – it is beside the point that he lacks complete botanical information about the
Arabian peninsula:
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…it is very usual in all countries to make frequent allusions to the brightness of
the celestial luminaries, which give their light to all; but the metaphors taken from
them have an additional beauty, if we consider them as made by a nation, who
pass most of their nights in the open air, or in tents, and consequently see the
moon and stars in their greatest splendor (1772, p. 178).
Stetkevych emphasizes the Romantic aspects of the views Jones puts forth in the second
essay of his 1772 volume, but if we consider that it is specifically natural phenomena to
which Jones is relating the Arabic poets, we will see that the poet takes on a really
distinct role – and the Arabic poets, he writes, “have as much genius as ourselves” and
“they enjoy some peculiar advantages over us” (1772, p. 174). It is neither, in other
words, that an Arab poet could be said to possess more facility of mimetic description
because of his proximity to nature, nor that he is expressing his own subjectivity, (along
the lines of Schiller’s conception of sentimental poetry, the primary example of a
Romantic sensibility noted by Stetkevych). Rather, some more unique articulation is
being made. Firstly, Jones associates the Eastern poets with magic, a not-uncommon
association, which some have called into question (accurate anthropological data from
pre-Islamic Arabia being what it is, I don’t know whether the argument is solvable).4 In a
Latin treatise from 1771, Jones describes Arab poetry as “lawful magic,” such is its
power (qtd. in Murray, 72).
Secondly, this authoritative relationship of the perhaps supernaturally invested
poet to his society as one of authority finds a correlative in England in the trope of the
poet as legislator, and proceeds directly from the idea that primitive poetry communes
more directly with nature. Dustin H. Griffin describes how, following Horace’s
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description (in the Ars Poetica) of Orpheus’s mastery of wild beasts with his music and
of Amphion’s ability to move stones with his lyre, as well as Aristotle’s assertion that
originally the poet, legislator and philosopher were one individual, a number of 18th
century British writers went on to assert that the model poet – Pindar and Homer were
two favorite examples – was both a civilizing figure capable of controlling nature, and
hence also a legislator (68, 69). The logic of such mythological arguments then led to the
general figure of the contemporary poet qua legislator, expressive of his patriotic duty to
the good of the state. Thomas Blackwell, the most famous jurist of his day, with whom
Jones the lawyer would have been exceedingly familiar, concludes a discussion of the
origins of the nation with some verses to the effect that the Poet was more important than
the patriarch, priest or lawgiver:
The POET’s Eye, in a fine Frenzy rolling,
Did glance from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven;
And as Imagination bodied forth
The Forms of Things unknown, the Poet’s Pen
Turn’d them to Shape, and gave to airy Nothing
A local Habitation and a Name (411).
As Griffin notes, the figure of the poet as inscribing über-legislator appears in Rasselas
and later, more famously perhaps in Shelley’s Defense of Poetry. He goes on to suggest
that this “lofty, self-aggrandizing, and (to us) utterly fantastical idea of poet as legislator
of the world – or as higher than legislator” came about because “poets feared that they
were losing a public function that they dared to imagine that a poet might serve his nation
as a patriot” (71).
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We have now come full circle, and can see the complete trajectory by which
Labīd could become a patriot. For Jones, the description of the Mu’allaqaat as something
like eclogues leads directly to the political potency he attributes to the Arab poetic
imagination. One upshot of the view of the Arabs as an essentially politically independent
people is that he interprets the fakhr that he comes across as a specimen of patriotism.
However, his view on Arabs’ political essence could just as easily be seen to come first:
it seems as sensible that he explains the Arabic political essence as an inference from the
elevated pitch of self-assertion to be found in the last section of almost every Arabic
poem, at least those from the Jāhilīya. The construction of fakhr qua patriotic effusion
originates indeed in British historical circumstances, but it is not arbitrarily projected
onto the Arabic cultural product. It is a British explanation of an Arabic cultural
particularity.
It should be noted that there is a peculiar accuracy to the explanation, too. British
society was still, in the late 18th century, monarchical, mercantilist, and pre-industrial.
Even Americans were at best evenly split as to their loyalties to the king. To us, coming
from a less vertically, hierarchically organized historical moment, the amount of boasting
in Arabic poetry may appear as some species of individualistic egotism. A certain
applicability of the label of patriotism for the fakhr does not keep Jones from considering
that ‘Amr bin Kulthūm goes a bit far: “The oration or poem, or whatever it may be called,
is arrogant beyond all imagination” (73), though he concedes that, based on his sources,
the Banu Taghlib were indeed worthy of all ‘Amr’s boasts. He shows more sympathy
with Labīd. Of the enormous amount of self-evaluation in the poem, “he celebrates his
own intrepidity in danger, and firmness of his military station … he passes to the praises
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of his own hospitality; and concludes with a panegyrick upon the virtues of his tribe,”
(44) Jones states simply that “he maintained the glory of his countrymen and his own
dignity against all opponents” (43).
The translations themselves reflect the political interpretation by Jones of certain
portions of the Mu’allaqaat. In a couple of instances this appears as quite explicit
distortions of the language, as in his ln. 104 of ‘Amru bin Kulthūm’s poem, which reads:
“When a tyrant oppresses and insults a nation, we disdain to degrade ourselves by
submitting to his will.” This is a rendering of the line,
idhā mā-l-malku sāma n-nāsa khasfan
abaynā an nuqirra dh-dhulla fīnā
The most notable changes that occur are, of course, the transformation of malk from a
more literal “king” into “tyrant,” and of nās from a more literal “people” into “nation,” a
more inherently political term in modern English. This latter is no great stretch, except
when, as here, the implication is that the nation or people in question are spurning the
rule of a monarch. F.E. Johnson translates the entire line as: “When that the king treats
people with indignity, we refuse to honour submission amongst us.”
Labīd offers another example:
wa idhā l-amānatu qussimat fī ma’sharin
awfā bi-awfari hazzinā qassāmuhā
rendered by Suzanne Stetkevych as:
When trusts were apportioned to the tribes,
The apportioner allotted us the greatest share. (ln. 84)
and by Jones as:
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When peace has been established by our tribe, we keep it inviolate;
and He, who makes it, renders our prosperity complete (ln. 86).
There is nothing in the Arabic to really justify rendering al-amānatu as “peace” – it
means something more like “loyalty” or “steadfastness,” and from the root a-m-n
meaning “to be loyal, faithful.” Moreover, that which in the second hemistich is “given in
full measure” (awfā), “in great abundance” (bi-awfari), is the “shares” (hazz) of this
amānatu. By using the word “prosperity,” Jones conjures some sort of national economic
status. In fact, the combination of “peace and plenty” was a common theme, if not a rundown cliché, in patriotic poetry of the 18th century, by which is meant poetry celebrating
the glory of Great Britain as a commercial nation-state. This genre tended to praise
Britain’s middle-of-the-road “constitution” (i.e., usually the Hanoverian dynasty), her
mercantile, sea-going economy, to describe the abundance of her countryside, and
favorably note the deforestation of the nation’s oaks to make naval and merchant ships.
Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest (1713) is a classic early example (he was a Tory, so he
praises the Stuarts (Anne, the James’ and the Charles’). He hated the then soon-tosucceed Hanovers (the Georges), on the grounds that they were boorish, borderline
illiterate, unsupportive of English letters, and German):
Let India boast her Plants, nor envy we
The weeping Amber or the balmy Tree,
While by our Oaks the precious Loads are born,
And Realms commanded which those trees adorn…
Here Ceres’ Gifts in waving Prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful Reaper’s Hand,
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Rich Industry sits smiling on the Plains,
And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns (lns. 29-32, 39-42).
It could readily be said that the two poets have a similar economic condition in mind, but
the contrast between the two poetic moments is striking. In Pope’s poem, Britain’s peace
and prosperity is depicted arm in arm with Britain’s command of the realms adorned by
“weeping Amber or balmy Tree,” i.e. India. In Jones’s rendering of Labīd, the Arabs are
indeed reproductions of the British to a certain extent, boasting military prowess and
attendant peace and prosperity, but this is precisely what is curious about it. Such lines
certainly quite literally “domesticate the Orient,” as Said would say, but in doing so he is
depicting Taghlib as rulers in their own right, rather than people for Britain to potentially
rule. This is not to argue against Jones’s obvious support for some species of imperialism,
but merely to point out that the representations of non-Europeans can cut both ways. This
point, I will grant, may be a bit contentious.
However, another over (and more interesting) phenomenon in the translations as a
result of Jones’s political project is his attention to gender. This should be seeing in the
cultural context of, in the late 18th century, increasingly emotional men. In 1783 we are
only about a decade from such sentimental, earth-shatteringly well-selling early
Romantic texts as MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), which features a weeping
character, usually the male protagonist, in almost every chapter, or Goethe’s depiction of
the suicidal young Werther (1774). One might expect to see accordingly some such
pathetic figure in the nasībs of the Mu’allaqaat as Jones translates them, but on the
contrary he seems to show a careful awareness of the extravagance of masculine
emotional display. According to Griffin, the celebratory discourse on British empire was
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often tinged with the anxiety that Britain was overextending herself, or that her citizens
were becoming too used to luxury and sloth as a result of commercial success. Following
hard upon this possibility was the omnipresent danger that the British could end up like
the French, effeminate and soft (13). Indeed, what one might consider the culminating
moments of 18th century patriotism – the American and French Revolutions – made this
attention to gender all the more manifest, drawing strongly on Roman sources such as
Cicero and emphasizing classic Roman virtue and virility as necessary character traits of
a patriot.
Some passages from the beginning of Imru’ al-Qays’s poem will demonstrate
Jones’s choices.
fafādat dumū’u l-‘ayni minnī sabābatan
‘alā n-nahri hattā balla dam’iya mihmalī
Stetkevych’s translation is:
Then my eyes, out of ardent love, send down a flood of tears upon my neck,
Till my sword belt was soaked in tears (ln. 9).
The line itself is about effeminacy, indicated by depicting his teary wetness as excessive
to the point that it moistens his sword belt, token of masculinity. The effect is really
almost comical. Jones renders the lines thusly: “Then gushed the tears from my eyes,
through excess of regret, and flowed down my neck, till my sword-belt was drenched in
the stream.” In the Arabic, this line contains perhaps something of a pun, since the root of
sabābatan, s-b-b, means “to pour forth water,” (Hava 386) while sabābatan itself means
pretty much “out of ardent love.” By rendering it as an “excess of regret,” Jones registers
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in effect the defective quality of the persona’s emotional process in the nasīb. The surplus
of his tears is also emphasized by the rendering of the first hemistich of line:
wa inna shifā’ī ‘abratun muharāqatun (ln. 6)
as “A profusion of tears, answered I, is my sole relief.”
This is literally accurate, but also connotes excess. Jones no doubt has in mind the Latin
sense of “profusion” from its root in profundere meaning to “pour forth,” but it also
connotes (as using the native English word “pour” does not) “lavish or wasteful
expenditure or bestowal of money, substance, etc.; squandering, waste” according to the
OED, which cites mid-18th century usages of the word in this sense. Similarly, in the
third line of the nasīb in Jone’s version, he has one of Imru’ al-Qays’s companions say to
him, “perish not through despair,” which reads “la tahlik asan” (ln. 5) and is rendered
more accurately by Stetkevych as “do not perish out of grief.” “Despair” would have
been a stronger word in the 18th century, evoking a term condemned theologically as a
sort of rebellion against God, as in the battle between Red Crosse Knight and Despair in
Bk. I of the Faerie Queene, and used frequently to convey a sense of total destitution, as
Locke writes in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “Despair is the thought of
the unattainableness of any Good” (Qtd. in OED entry for “Despair”). The entire nasīb is
actually framed as a dialogue between Imru’ al-Qays and his friends, who “urge …
topicks of consolation” (2) There is really only one line in the Arabic text, which lacks
quotation marks anyway, that his companions definitely speak to him – the rest may or
may not be Imru’ al-Qays’s persona musing to himself. In Jones’s version, the poet’s
reminiscences (“a lovely account of his juvenile frolicks”) are much more clearly framed
as responses to external injunctions from his comrades intended to facilitate the
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emergence from the defective state of “excess regret” and “despair,” rather than possibly
the persona’s own musings to himself using the second person.
In a manner then not dissimilar to Suzanne Stetkevych’s argument, that Imru’ alQays is implicitly passing from a state of required restitution of his father’s murder and
the enacting of it, Jones asks us to see a certain symmetry in the qasīda. Part of what
emerges, keeping our 18th century hat on, is a contrast between the beautiful and the
sublime, that incessant movement from the detailed to the overwhelming so pervasive in
18th century aesthetics. Jones seems to have associated the storm scene of Imru’ al-Qays
with a kind of sublime moment – this would very fittingly contrast with the intense
femininity expressed in the nasīb, since the beautiful was precisely the effect held to
obtain in such amorous matters. As we have seen, Jones held that the felicity of
expression in Arabic poetry emerged from a closer proximity between their poetic
language and nature. One result of this is that the sublime is more powerfully rendered in
Arabic poetry.
we must not believe that the Arabian poetry can please only by its descriptions of
beauty; since the gloomy and terrible objects, which produce the sublime, when
they are aptly described, are no where more common than in the Desert and Stony
Arabia’s … If we allow the natural objects, with which the Arabs are perpetually
conversant, to be sublime … our next step must be, to confess that their
comparisons, metaphors, and allegories are so likewise (1772, p. 177).
Since ultimately our goal in this essay is to pass beyond mere comparison and contrasting
of Jones’s text with the original, measuring his distortions and accuracies, I would like to
consider the English Imru’ al-Qays for a moment, just as he appears in Jones’s English –
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which is pretty accurate in the storm scene, to examine this matter of the natural and the
poetic, though we will soon enough hit on another translation quirk that will send us
briefly over to Labīd.
The storm scene reproduces all of the elements of the nasīb. This has been noted
before, but a few components are not often cited – I would like to draw attention
especially to the relation between geography and the poetic elements of the nasīb and
storm scene. The excessive wateriness of the poem’s persona in the nasīb is of course
matched by the downpour at the end, and moreover, the entirety is framed as an object
gazed upon by the poet and his companions: in the opening of the qasidah, he says:
“Stay—let us weep at the remembrance of our beloved, at the sight of the station where
her tent was raised, by the edge of yon bending sands between DAHUL and HAUMEL.”
Jones emphasizes the construction of the scene by the poetic gaze by inserting (as his
italics denote), the phrase “at the sight.” Moreover, we seem to have the same sort of
geographically synthesizing vision granted in the nāsīb as in the storm scene, with a
series of place names filling out the lines – al-Dakūl, Hawmal, Tūdih, al-Miqrat (Jones
translates Siqt al-Liwā as “yon bending sands.” He would also seem to have us moving
from place to place to look at each one. The effect remains – the storm scene we watch
replaces the destroyed abodes: “I sit gazing at it, while my companions stand between
DAARIDGE and ODHAIB; but far distant is the cloud on which my eyes are fixed. Its
right side seems to pour its rain on the hills of KATAN, and its left on the mountains of
SITAAR and YADBUL.” The pouring forth of water, the tears that “gush” in a “stream”
in line 7, are now extrojected into nature. What, we may ask, is the poetic effect of this,
either from an 18th century point of view or from our own? I have written elsewhere that
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the general movement of the qasidah seems to be that of a containment of the negation of
the subject temporally, in that the pastness of the beloved’s experience with the speaking
subject is internalized as a geographical meandering before being re-spatialized (and
hence poetically describable) as the rahīl, so that we could read the otherwise
inexplicable presence of so many she-camels as existentially necessary. This may reflect
my fondness for Being and Time more than anything an Arabian poet was up to in the 6th
century sometime, or perhaps even a more fundamental contiguity between Sartre and
Imru’ al-Qays, though actually my explanation would be more congenial to poems
containing a movement of reaggregation, as Suzanne Stetkevych uses the term, such as
Labīd.
Reading the storm as sublime entirely contradicts this reading. It is true that we
are enjoying a controlled aesthetic experience when we read of the storm, and the poet is
rendering nature into a linguistic medium by describing it, but an 18th century aesthetics
would view the sublime as quite the opposite. Burke (a friend of Jones’s) describes the
sublime as an experience of a terrifying and overwhelming sort (and yet, one funnily
amenable to the rational discourse of his Enquiry). As he sums it up, “The passion caused
by the great and sublime in nature … is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of
the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (95). Jones
seems a bit at a loss, when one looks directly at his argument for the poem. Describing
the concluding section, he gives up entirely on his attempt to render the poem into a
contiguous narrative, as following the akhbār he persistently attempts: “Here his
narrative seems to be interrupted by a storm of lightning and violent rain: he nobly
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describes the shower and the torrent, which is produced down all the adjacent mountains;
and, his companions retiring to avoid the storm, the drama ends abruptly” (3).
My conception of the nasīb, which is pretty much a slight modification of Jaroslav
Stetkevych’s idea of the poet as an “Arabic Orpheus” (119), has the poetic subjectivity
giving concrete form to an encounter with time. My own prejudices (and many of ours,
for that matter), which here incline towards the Heideggerian, could be thrown into sharp
relief in contrast with Jones. The barefaced fact of lost love, which Jones takes as an
obvious given on the part of the poet, is shamelessly erased in certain methods of
unloving analysis. I think this is regrettable, if inevitable, but worth noting. The image
cluster that is of most relevance to us for this matter of the subjective encounter with
temporality is that of liquid flows and overflowings. Jones alerts us, with a
mistranslation, of the presence of this image cluster at the end of Imru’ al-Qays and at the
beginning of Labīd. In his line 8 of the latter, he writes “The torrents have cleared the
rubbish, and disclosed the traces of habitations, as the reeds of a writer restore effaced
letters in a book. In line 72 of Imru’ al-Qays’s poem, he writes “The summit of
MOGAIMIR, covered with the rubbish which the torrent has rolled down, looks in the
morning like the top of a spindle encircled with wool.” In the sense that he translates “attulūl” in the line from Labīd as “rubbish,” and to the extent that rubbish partially
connotes “rubble,” i.e., the remains of buildings, his wording is partially accurate, and
perhaps intended. In both lines the word sayl or suyūl – torrent/s – is translated just as
that. However, the word in the line from Imru’ al-Qays is “al-ghushā’,” which a modern
commentator defines as “what the torrent carries of grasses, shrubs, trees, etc.” (28).
(Suzanne Stetkevych translates it as “dross”). From a certain point of view, turning the
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heavily loaded term atlāl into “rubbish” and putting rubbish on the top of Mt Mujaymir is
a distortion, but the torrents (suyūl) remain. The imagery, in either case, indicates the
overwhelming of human temporality by the otherness of nature, or at least Jones’s
description of Imru’ al-Qays’s storm, with its narrative-breaking force and abrupt
termination would corroborate such a view. In one poem, this encounter with nature is a
feature of the nasīb, and in another, it concludes the poem. What could we make of this?
The effects are numerous. Just within Imru’ al-Qays’s poem, not only is the
nature’s sublimity a kind of projection of his own opening tears, but it poetically reexpresses the themes of the nasīb on a level bereft of humanity, which is to say, that the
encounter with the pastness of the past in terms of the beloved’s absence is re-expressed
as the absence of all humanity in the triumph of nature, especially in the use of imagery
expressing fertility (the downpour) as destructive of nature itself. Then too, Imru’ alQays’s own fertility or the lack thereof is called into question – is the downpour and its
destructiveness an expression of his philandering poetics, or is the inherent
destructiveness of nature’s fertility expressed in the persona’s individual humanity? Do
we read the images of weeping as informed by the imagery of downpour, or vice versa?
Could we not read the storm scene then back into the nasīb, such that Imru’ al-Qays is not
projecting some sort of psychological subjective sentiments onto nature at the end, but
that the motion of grieving at loss is after a fashion a sort of recapitulation of the
otherness of nature within the human act itself? Which direction is time moving in
anyway, from the destruction of the human by nature or towards the eternalization of the
cultural using natural imagery, as in Labīd, where imagery of writing is transferred from
depictions of nature to his own representations of his own tribe, thus poetically writing
/21
some of the eternity of nature into his own transitory cultural world? Speaking of Labīd
the patriot, what ever happened to politics?
In Common Sense, Thom Paine (like Jones, a friend of Ben Franklin) used one
metaphor of nature after another to justify American independence. He states things such
as a rebuttal of the argument that America’s prosperity occurred under colonization and
will therefore continue with “we may as well assert that because a child has thriven upon
milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is (sic) to
become a precedent for the next twenty (in Ver Steeg, 452) or that “there is something
very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no
instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet … England and
America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of nature” (456). Common
Sense was actually much more about rhetoric than about sense, and reads all the more
powerfully for it. What it has in common with Jones and his Arabic poets is the desire to
connect representations of nature to the political sphere. Indeed, when we look at the shift
that occurred with regard to men (or women for that matter) of letters influence on
politics from the period after the British Civil War until the American Revolution, there
is a world of difference between Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, which was widely
read and which perhaps influenced the outcome of the Exclusion crisis, to a text like
Common Sense by a partially-employed, self-educated agitator, which perhaps helped
start the Revolutionary War. Did Jones take an interest in Arab poets because the coding
of nature that allowed the literati more direct access to social power was changing? Is it a
trans-social universal that successful literate or symbolically-skilled classes mediate
necessarily between the absolutes of nature and the relativities of human culture? Were
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Jāhilīya poets such a class? In what way would such trans-cultural phenomena articulate
themselves either in poetic or other cultural forms, historically or today? Could literate
experiences of trans-cultural conduits really constitute any kind of politically significant
aesthetic experience? This essay would probably have been better if it had attempted to
answer these questions instead of concluding only by raising them, but it’s too late now.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arberry, A.J. The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature. London: G. Allen
and Unwin, 1957.
‘Atār, Sulyamān, al-Mu’allaqāt as-sab’: sharh mu’āsir wa-tabsīt lil-shurūh al-qadīmah. alQāhirah: al-Dār al-Thaqāfīyah lil-Nashr, 2002.
Barfoot, C.C. and D’haen, Theo. Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of
the East. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
Blackwell, Thomas. Letters Concerning Mythology. London, 1748.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful. 4th ed. London, 1764.
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Griffen, Dustin H. Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth Century Britain. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Johnson, F.E. Al-Mu’allaqaat: The Seven Poems Suspended in the Temple at Mecca. New
York: AMS Press, 1973 (reprint)
Jones, Sir William. Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick
Languages. To Which Are Added Two Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772.
— The Moallakát, or Seven Arabian Poems, Which Were Suspended on the
Temple at Mecca. London: 1772.
Kerr, Malcom H. (ed.) Islamic Studies: A Tradition and its Problems. Malibu, CA:
Undena Publications, 1980.
Murray, Alecander, ed. Sir William Jones, 1746-1794: A Commemoration. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Stetkevytch, Suzanne Pinckney (ed.) Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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Stetkevytch, Suzanne Pinckney. The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the
Poetics of Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Ver Steeg, Clarence L. and Hofstadter, Richard. Great Issues in American History: From
Settlement to Revolution, 1584-1776. New York: Vintage, 1969.
1
For an 18th century studies example of the sort of translation analysis that I have in mind, cf. Resemblance
and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture, by Helen Deutsch. Deutsch has several
interesting analyses of Pope’s translation of certain passages from the Iliad as well as his translation of
Horace’s Odes and Epistles. She demonstrates, for example, Pope’s spectatorily visual, “gallery stroll”
presentation of Homeric epic. Literary studies tends to divide something like the relationship between
Horace and Pope into two questions: what does Pope add to a poem by Horace, and “influence studies,”
rather than say, discussing in one study the themes the two authors address (this would presumably be
comparative literature, which consistently disappoints us).
2
Contradictorily, Venuti both laments the fact that Americans read less and less foreign literature, and
valorizes translations that “foreground the play of the signifier by cultivating polysemy, neologism,
fragmented syntax, discursive heterogeneity,” i.e., things that make it more difficult to read a text, a surefire way to keep the public from reading more, except perhaps in Paris whence all these values emerged.
Surely we can find a compromise between market-driven, shameless exoticism, and Jacques Derrida or
Hélène Cixous. Though maybe this is the kind of fantastic transatlanticism that, existing in the middle,
would have only water to stand on.
3
I am not alone in this view. As Alexander Murray writes in a uniquely Oxonian preface, “History is
unkind to polymaths … [we] have to mental ‘slot’ in which to keep a polymath’s memory fresh. So the
polymath gets forgotten, or, at best, squashed into a category we can recognize” (v). His figurative
language is weirdly akin (with its squashings and slottings of history) to Edward Said, who seems to avow
that he understands the whole thing, but his application of a discursive theory really lacks nuance at times.
If doing real history, (not that this essay is such) we could at least note the pathetic lack of response to
Jones’s hopeful request that “if the learned here or on the Continent will favour him in the course of the
summer with their strictures and annotations, …[they] will transmit them for that purpose to the publisher”
(qtd. in Arberry 13). For a more contemporary, American example, (of a man with an audience he didn’t
know he didn’t want) anyone who has read George Kennan’s July 1947 article in Foreign Affairs, will note
the discrepancy between a qualified, careful analysis and the blundering, militaristic, global tragi-farce that
America’s containment policy became. History only needed one sentence for the purposes of the Cold War,
Korea, and Vietnam (regarding the “adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly
shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy” (qtd.
in Ambrose, 96)) One suspects the Cold War isn’t exactly Kennan’s fault; it seems feasible we could have
used some other well-phrased tidbit from somewhere else, and things would have fallen into place just the
same. Perusing this, the reader may wonder what I have against Foucaultian discursive models of history: I
want my analysis not only to describe nodes of power, linkages and networks of force, distributions of
coercion and all that, but good solid gush about ruins, flowers and stars, too. This is the content that gets
lost, in Said’s view and in others. If the discursive structures don’t care about George Kennan’s quotations
of Thomas Mann, or of how beautiful Jones finds the gazelle he saw once, should we then not?
4
Cf. Khurshid Rizvi’s “The Status of the Poet in Jāhiliyya” (Hamdard Islamicus v. VI, n. ii, pp. 97-110,
1983). His argument is something of a muddle, since he cites William Jones as testamentary evidence
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against some supernatural status on the part of the poet, even though Jones both apparently thought the
Jāhiliyya poets had some access to magic and got any number of anthropological details about 6 th century
Arabian manners entirely wrong.