ABSTRACT
Following al-Ṣāḥib’s move to his newly-built mansion in Esfahan, probably in 366/976,1 a memorable inauguration event took place at which many poets recited odes. The vizier had prompted the poets to describe the mansion in their odes, and this indeed was their key theme, besides the lauded figure of its owner which was often inextricable from the mansion. Twenty selections from this poetry came down to us in a letter sent by Abū Muḥammad al-Khāzin to Abū Bakr al-Khwārazmī. Al-Thaʿālibī, to whom Abū Bakr read the letter, preserved it in Yatīmat al-dahr.2 Despite the fact that the odes have not survived in their complete versions, we still have a significant poetic collection, in which nine odes exceed ten lines, the longest being al-Rustamī’s (46 lines). Unfortunately, except for a few general remarks at the beginning of the letter, we have no comments on the performance, which could have enhanced our understanding of the odes and the event. These two limitations of incompleteness and lack of sufficient contextual detail notwithstanding, the surviving material constitutes an important opportunity for the study of the prevalent stylistic tendencies in the field. My working assumption was that given the great importance of this event, the recited Mansion Odes reflected to a large extent the hegemonic stylistic norms in the literary field of al-Ṣāḥib’s court. Given the uneven selections at hand, however, a close comparative study of the poems’ structure cannot yield systematic results that could help shed light on their dominant style. Instead, as I will explain, it would be more productive to subject one ode, al-Rustamī’s, to a close scrutiny. One of the few structural conclusions we may still draw is that all selections, except the last two, feature the ode’s monorhyme at the end of both hemistiches in the first line, and hence it is most likely that they were cited from the start. The Mansion Odes as a whole show a leaning toward the “natural” (maṭbūʿ) style rather than the artful/artificial (maṣnūʿ), while they do moderately incorporate features from the latter. This is despite the fact that waṣf may give itself easily to a mannerist descriptive style.3 Maṭbūʿ and maṣnūʿ were binary oppositions used at the time of the “moderns” (muḥdathūn) of the ʿAbbāsid period to typify those whose poetry (or the poetry itself ) was spontaneous against those whose poetry (or the poetry itself ) was “crafted” with rhetorical
figures to make the content strange and novel. The poets Abū Tammām and alBuḥturī came to personify (respectively) the maṣnūʿ verses maṭbūʿ dichotomy.4
