bewitched
pert-breasted girls
with a flicker of shyness
in their eyes,
white as the marble
effigies of goddesses.
War Songs is full of such terror and grace. As Montgomery notes in his panoramic introduction, the warriors of this pre-Islamic desert world “cherished their vehicles of war … their weaponry and armaments” (“we skewered their loins / with Rudaynah spears / that screamed as if / squeezed in a vise”), and he grasps that just as horse and camel, sword and spear complete the warrior, making him what he is, freeing him to do what he’s meant to do—in a word, ornamenting him in the etymological sense (ornamentum > L. to equip)—so too the poets of this warrior culture took up the tropes of the poem, the equipment and weapons of sensibility, to intensify our sense of experience, to let us dwell on it and in it, to make it memorable and pass it on.
Among the many marvels of Montgomery’s inspired assembly of ʿAntarah’s songs—easily the finest and boldest translation we have of a single pre-Islamic poet in English—the sheer nerve of it bounds off the page. The verve. Montgomery doesn’t shy away from convention’s challenge: to focus consciousness around a moment and bring it suddenly to larger life. He doesn’t apologize, doesn’t expurgate. He translates form and ornament through function. Understanding their purpose in the Arabic poem, he finds ways to get like work done in English, breaking down the Arabic line, for instance, into a variably staggered measure, one that allows him to magnify images within their off-kilter metrical frames, to bring out the directional tugs of rhetoric, the animating sonorities and their odd valences, in a way that the Arabic quantity does. All of which yields the rush and thrusts of the verse, the sharp swerves of perspective and tone. Call it modern, or the Arabic’s musical spell, kinesthesis or analepsis. It doesn’t matter. Picking his spots, Montgomery heads into the fray—sacrificing wisely, but preserving the heart of the poetry’s concretion, and making even place and proper names earn their keep, as a kind of percussion section in this orchestra:
Ask Khathʿam and ʿAkk
about our feats.
Ask the kings.
Ask Ṭayyiʾ of the Mountains.
Ask Ḍabbah’s folk about Shibāk
when in the fray
the Bakr yielded
their wives and ʿIqāl’s kin.
Ask Clan Ṣabāḥ
how we butchered them
at Dhāt al-Rimth
above Uthāl.
Ask Zayd and Sūd.
Ask al-Muqaṭṭaʿ
and Mujāshiʿ ibn Hilāl
how our spears
sought them out
how our horses
filled them with fear …
One reads this and wants to applaud. The enumeration of tribes and sites, like Homer’s list of ships or the Old Testament’s genealogies, are tests of investment through technique. And if, for all that, it seems the poetry doth protest just a little too much for contemporary comfort, if the self-vaunting (fakhr, literally “pride”) comes across as a bardic wee bit out of control, this, it soon becomes clear, is part of its action-hero or rapper-like over-the-topness, the artfully hyperbolic presentation of a fabled, contest-crazed figure, one who’s endowed with super- or at least superior powers, which he wields against the tallest odds. It’s a figure who, in the weave of Montgomery’s lines, calls to mind the dragon-stalking Beowulf and Pound’s wyrd-weary Seafarer, as it also invokes the Achilles of Logue’s cinematic War Music, or Prudentius’ Psychomachia, with its allegorical war for the soul.
Throughout, Montgomery gives us what Pound said a translator must: “Trace of that power which implies the man”—here, a figure of elemental vitality, a magnetic literary character who, in the fullest sense, is a product of translation’s sustained audition. And palpably within that hearing, inside the poetry’s winning belligerence, and its half-hallucinatory boasts and assault, ʿAntarah’s reiteration of prowess betrays an anxiety that belongs to us all. There is, again, the pathos of the not-quite-member of the tribe (excluded, in this case, by virtue of his race). But evident too are other aspects of exile’s anxiousness echoing across these lines. For ʿAntarah is always on the cusp, always at the precarious edge, or stranded in the slippery middle. He is inside the fight but beyond it (composing); within the present, but before and past it; together with his beloved (ʿAblah in memory), but forever far-off and denied her love. As daunting warrior and defender of repute, he serves as spokesman for his clan. But as poet whose ultimate weapons are words, as solitary soldier of extreme exposure—vulnerable in the face of Fate and Time—he wars at the margins to defend the center, the heart of the human matrix that made him.
It’s in that trial, played out against the desert’s starkness, that we discover the poet’s resolute spirit, which James Montgomery takes up in these versions and releases to you now.
Peter Cole
Yale University
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
You would not be reading this book had I not received the help of many people. Gratitude first and foremost goes to the late Peter Heath, for his selection of texts and encouragement. Were it not for the guidance of two inspirational teachers and gifted translators, Peter Cole and Richard Sieburth, the project would have taken a very different direction. Richard made such contributions to the translations that in the end he became joint translator of the volume, though I claim responsibility for the mistakes in the book. Peter Cole encouraged me to listen for the poems—only my wrongheadedness and tin ear got in the way.
My collaborators at the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL), fellow editors, colleagues, and friends responded to my requests promptly and placed a great deal of trust in me: the meaning of true collaboration is yielding your words entirely to another’s discretion. Robyn Creswell and Jeannie Miller, the guest translators who popped in from time to time to help us out, made key interventions and provided an objective correlative to many of our exuberant notions.
My volume editor, Tahera Qutbuddin, has been as generous with her time as with her erudition. Her deep intimacy with classical Arabic poetry has saved me many a blush. LAL’s general editor, Philip Kennedy, and my fellow executive editor, Shawkat Toorawa, have been unflagging in their support and enthusiasm.
LAL is fortunate to have such a capable (and patient) editorial director in Dr. John Joseph Henry (Chip) Rossetti (how he manages to answer so many emails in the course of a day is a mystery to me), and our assistant editor Lucie Taylor is the epitome of intelligent efficiency. My copyeditor, Keith Miller, my proofreader, Wiam El-Tamami, LAL’s amazing digital production manager, Stuart Brown, and our paperback designer, Nicole Hayward, have done a splendid job in producing such handsome books.
On behalf of LAL I would like to thank Gila, Manal, Antoine, Amani, and the team at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, who make our visits there so memorable, enjoyable, and productive. We are indebted to the audiences who turned up in Abu Dhabi and Dubai during December 2013 to hear a trial run of some of our translations. Their words of engagement came at just the right time. Nnedi Okorafor, the writer of Antar the Black Knight, kindly let me see the scripts for the first two issues of the comic-book series.
Over the course of the project, I amassed electronic copies of over twenty-five manuscripts. Anyone familiar with the labyrinths of manuscript collections will know that I have had to rely on the kindness of many experts—in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Universitäts- und Forschungsbibliothek Erfurt/Gotha, the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and Dār al-Kutub in Cairo. I would like to thank Sumayya Ahmed