ABSTRACT

Medieval Arabic poetry, spanning the period from around 500 to 1800, has rarely found favour with Westerners. It has been criticized for its lack of “spontaneity,” the absence in it of the personal note, its emphasis on form over content, and its excessive indulgence in verbal pyrotechnics – antithesis, synonyms, puns, and other devices – not to mention its self-consciously inkhorn vocabulary. Indeed, the extraordinarily rich vocabulary of classical Arabic – with literally hundreds of words denoting, for example, the camel, the camel’s trappings and the beauties of the desert – does not lend itself easily to translation into other languages. e frustrated and impotent translator ends up with a prose version, which is workmanlike, but at and lifeless, in comparison with the resonance and force of the original.