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56 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Serious Effort, Worth the Read, January 12, 2001
This review is from: Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (Hardcover)
In what may be his most ambitious non-fiction work to date, Mr. Irwin has tackled a truly daunting task - an anthology of Arabic literature. I give him four stars. The fourth star is for attempting the effort in the first place. Theoretically, there is no reason why it should be any more difficult to prepare an anthology of Arabic literature than it would be for, say, Chinese literature; rather the contrary. However, I suspect that preparing an Arabic anthology is much harder. First of all, the traditional themes of Arabic literature - religion, romantic lament, fate, panegyric - on the whole have little appeal for Westerners, especially compared to a literature like the Chinese, which seems so secular and "modern" in theme by comparison. Secondly, most truly great Arabic literature is poetry, which is notoriously difficult to translate, and what's worse, the canons of poetic taste that govern it are almost entirely untranslatable into anything comparable in English. Despite these handicaps, Irwin has done an admirable job. One notices that there is a great deal of commentary. The selections tend to be short, with a great deal of explanation in between. There is so much commentary, in fact, that the book sometimes seems more a literary history than an anthology. However, this approach is necessary if the reader is to develop any appreciation at all of the material. Quite frankly, Arabic literature is a closed book to most readers, even in translation, and without a large amount of explanatory material the average reader would be lost. Irwin also resists the impulse, very common in specialists in a given literary area, of putting in a large number of his own translations. He does an excellent job of selecting the translations, in fact - a difficult task in itself, because there is an incredibly large number of bad translations from Arabic; for many translators, the attempt to be faithful to the Arabic models simply results in English doggerel. You will find no examples of this type in the book. If there is little to be said about the period after roughly 1300, there is a good reason for this: most of the truly great literature produced in the Middle East after that time was written in Farsi, and to a lesser degree in Turkish, both of which are not part of the subject matter for this book. In doing so, Mr. Irwin perhaps handicaps himself, but his intent is obviously to focus on Arabic literature. Outside of specialists, very little Arabic literature is known, whereas a great deal of Persian literature is readily available. Certainly, it will be a long time before the names of Abu Nuwas or Mutanabbi are houshold words. Before that can happen, however, there must be an appreciation of the literary environment that formed Clasical Arabic literature. Mr. Irwin's book is admirable in its attempt to convey that environment. To the reader sincerely interested in deepening his knowledge of Arabic civilization, it will be rewarding. To the reader whose goal is not that lofty, the book admittedly may be a bit of a chore to get through, but that does not impugn the effort.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
To The Max, December 22, 2008
We more books like this, for every literature and every language on the planet. My only complaint is that most of the translations are not his own, but are taken from various sources such as articles or even histories where the translations may or may not have been a centerpiece. That means that you're getting fragments of authors that may not be meritorious in their own right, but were meant to further the author's point in the original source.
So basically he's pilfered a library-worth of already translated bits and pieces given them all back to you with historical context included, and what this means is that the most famous works and certain highly famous authors (such as Al-Mutenabby or Al-Farazdaq) aren't represented by more than a few lines of their own, while other authors, not as well known, are given pages and pages.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fine Survey of Classical Arabic Literature, June 24, 2011
The editorial reviews (above) by Dr. Ali Houissa, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Librarian at Cornell, and by John Green of "Booklist" describe this volume very well. Thomas F. Ogara's customer review is also excellent; but this 460-page anthology and guidebook to a millennium of Arabic literature really deserves FIVE stars, not four. Because not everyone is interested in ANY literature from the Middle Ages, this may not rate as a five-star topic for some; but it is certainly a first-rate treatment. Americans like myself, from a country whose history is less than half as long as the period covered in this volume, may be much more interested in the increasingly-translated Arabic literature of the Modern Period (which coincides with the European settlement of America); but for those curious about the long Classical Period (6th-17th Centuries) of one of the great world civilizations, this is a superb introduction.
Author Robert G. Irwin, Middle East Editor of "The Times Literary Supplement" and author of 14 books concerning Arabic literature, introduces us to dozens of writers and their major works from seven sub-periods of this medieval millennium. He also explains the system of Arabic names, which may include all of the following: kunya/nickname, laqab/honorific name, ism/given name, nasab/father's & grand-father's name, nisbah/name of geographical origin. This may result in a daunting string of appellations; but individuals are commonly known by just one part of the entire name. Irwin gives us the full name of each writer but with the familiar, short form of it in capital letters; for example: Abu'l Tayyib Ahmad ibn Husayn al-MUTANABBI. The title of the book, incidentally, is taken from the most famous line of this most famous Arab poet: "I am known to night and horses and the desert, to sword and lance, to parchment and pen." Irwin mentions, too, how the poet's literary boasting actually contributed to his death in 965 AD. Accosted by robbers during travel, al-Mutanabbi was about to flee when a servant quoted the verse to him. He turned to fight his assailants and lost the battle!
Irwin likewise gives the full title of each literary work with transliterated Arabic words in italic print, followed by the English translation. (This review space does not permit italics in order to give an example.) He also explains multiple genres of this period: (1) qasida/ode, (2) madih/panegyric, (3) hijja/satire, (4) fakhr/boasting, (5) ritha/ lament, (6) wasf/description, (7) tardiyyat/hunting poems, (8) zuhdiyyat/ascetic poetry, (9) khamriyyat/wine-bibbing poems, (10) ikhwaniyyat/ letters between close friends, (11) mudhakarat/poems addressed to young boys, (12) manazarat/ debates about priority (e.g.: boys vs. girls, sheep-farmers vs, goat-farmers, speech vs. silence, summer vs. winter), and (13) khutab/liturgical oratory. He outlines the structure of the pre-eminent poetic form, the qasida, "a fairly long poem [10-80 lines] with a single rhyme and a single meter in hemistichs," as well as some of its meters and tropes. Irwin explains more than 130 arabic literary and cultural terms (transliterated and italicized) as he elucidates his large selection of literary passages that range from a few lines to several pages. The book lacks a glossary of these terms, but they are easily noted and clearly explained in the text.
"Night & Horses & the Desert," at a bargain price and by an expert on the subject, is a five-star introduction to a major world literature. Enjoy!
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