BIRDS THROUGH A CEILING OF ALABASTER

 

translated by

 

G.B.H. Wightman and A.Y. al-Udhari

 

Penguin Classics

Paper, 128 pages

ISBN: 0 14 044-305-3

 

 

 

A thousand years ago, Baghdad stood as one of the centers of the civilized world, producing literature unequaled by few cultures. Now we have bombed it with laser bombs and cruise missiles, we have built the fortress of the Green Zone within the old city, and our soldiers and Iraqis die as car bombs explode and our politicians dither. And what, really, do we know about the culture of the country we invaded on a premise based on lies? Maybe, just maybe, a few history lessons would have been in order. Maybe even a study of some of the literature from the region.

Our neglect of Arab literature is apparent from the fact that a little known but slender and exquisite translation of Arab poetry, Birds Through A Ceiling Of Alabaster, has, sadly, long been out of print. The pages of my own copy are now yellow with age, the pages dog-eared after thirty years of returning to it time and again as the poetry within it remains, still today, a delight of discovery. Translated by George Wightman and Abdullah Al-Udhari, it contains precise images, concise language, and will take you to a world you want to know, not a world you want to bomb.

The title, Birds Through A Ceiling Of Alabaster, comes from an ancient Yemen king whose palace was built with a ceiling made of alabaster so the king could lie on his back to watch birds fly overhead. The poetry, like the birds through the alabaster, is just as translucent. And Wightman, as one of the translators, is one of those rare writers who responds to an inquiry from someone he doesn t know and, in so doing, provides guidance on further studies. In our current cultural war with the Arab world, we would do well to know that world s history, its literature, and recognize the debt the Western world owes it.

Wightman s translations come from the Abbasid Period, 750 to 1258 C.E., centered in Baghdad. There the mingling of Persian, Indian, and Greek writing and thought created a flowering of Arab literature comparable to the Tang in China. In Wightman s translations, he shows us the talent and skill of three Arabic poets who range in mood from serious speculation to exuberant sensuality to delicate lyricism.

To put this period in context, it began barely 100 years after the death of Mohammed in 632 C.E. Within 30 years of his death, his followers had moved out of the Arabian Peninsula and created an empire across present-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Libya. By 750, they had added Pakistan and Afghanistan to the East and extended the empire across North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean and up the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees. But this spread of Islam did not subjugate poetry. As Wightman says:

Some religious poetry did result, but the main body of work remained secular, and emphatically so. It is possible that the conflict which inevitably arose between Islam and the poet s desires acted as a spur. Poetry became both an outlet and a cry of defiance, the cry being an admission of that humanity which Islam wished to discipline.

 

At the center of all this was Baghdad which, on the banks of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, had wharves with ships from China, Malaya, India, Africa, Turkey, Syria, Russia.

[T]he wealth, the diversity of races, the amalgam of cultures and the new ideas which flooded into Baghdad during this period led to an assault on established values, the encouragement of hedonism and innovation in art.

 

Sound like Rome a thousand years before? Or New York today, a thousand years later? The parallel should not escape us. As in contemporary America, poets of the Abbasid Period tended toward natural speech and colloquial language. They also employed the qit a, a short descriptive poem with pre-Islamic origins, and which means, literally, a fragment, and, like an epigram, tends to concentrate on a single subject or theme. For his translations of qit a, Wightman focused on three poets Ahnaf, Mu tazz, and Ma arri.

Ahnaf was born in 750 C.E. Little known in the West, he wrote love poetry. When a Caliph and a favorite concubine refused to see each other, Ahnaf wrote a short set of verses to bring them together, for which he was richly rewarded. Ahnaf s poetry, as described by Wightman, is deceptively simple. His imagery is so natural we are likely to overlook its originality, as shown by the following:

When she walks with her girl servants,

Her beauty is a moon between swaying lanterns.

 

As Wightman says, this picture is clear, penetrating and immediate. It is also unusual. So too is Ahnaf s image of unrequited love:

I ve become a candle thread destined

To light a room for other men

While burning away into thin air.

 

According to Wightman, Ahnaf constructed the imagery of one line so that it was not logically connected with the imagery of another, but placed together the sequence of unexpected relationships establishes an organic sum which in turn creates an overall mood. For instance:

Love has trees in my heart, and they

Are watered by pent-up rivers.

 

The black-eyed girl who s so demure,

And speaks coyly like a high flute,

Nudged sleep from my head. My liver

Turned to fire and I cried with pain.

 

This quick switch from one image to another, to evoke the mixed emotions of love turned wrong, is something Ahnaf perfected, perhaps better than any other poet:

The heart is a hectare of love,

An orchard of prickly tragacanth trees.

 

He was also a master at word-repetition, much as was Catullus 700 years before, and much as was Shakespeare 700 years later:

She is formed complete

And beauty is complete

In her face; beauty

Which lies not in her face

Lacks beauty s total.

Once a month people see

A new moon in the sky.

Every dawn I hold

A new moon in her face

 

In a peculiar twist of fate, the concubine whom Ahnaf re-united with the Caliph became the great-grandmother of Mu tazz, born in 861 C.E. When Mu tazz was six weeks old, his grandfather, the Caliph, was murdered by the palace guards. Eight years later, his father was also murdered. Mu tazz escaped to Mecca, then later returned but avoided politics. Finally, at age 47, in an effort to end court intrigue, he assumed the throne, but ruled only for a day and a night, went into hiding, was found out, and strangled. Hardly fit to rule, the poet in his soul was such that a later treatise, published in 1070 C.E., described his art as so light and so delicate it can scarcely be detected.

Night has fallen about us my friend,

Light our fire with wine

So, while the world sleeps, we may kiss

The sun in the dark.

 

Who writes poetry like this today? Who today in the West would consider the Arab world a center of culture and art? While we bomb Arabs, and they bomb us, whatever peaceful communications can be opened between the two worlds cannot be a bad thing, and one place to start is with Abbasid poetry. Wightman describes the work of Mu tazz as thus:

Frequently he concentrates upon an intense visual experience in a surprising metaphor or simile. We derive pleasure not only from the economy and brilliance of expression, but also from the fact that he makes us see physical objects from a different angle. They are made new and, an interesting epistemological point, the result is more accurate than most descriptions. There are few English poets who see the world quite so sharply. It is arguable that the clarity of light in the Middle East, in contrast to the subtleties of shade in northern Europe, is responsible for this distinction.

 

The same observation has been made of the difference between paintings from the American East and those from the clear, spare air of the American West. But the following sharp and vivid image, together with the emotion it evokes, is something often lost to us today:

Moving fast a girl came to me one night

Hurrying to abscond from innocence.

 

When she walked, her body said to the wind,

If you re serious, this is the way you should stir

 

The branches.

 

The quiet eroticism of Mu tazz is nowhere more present than in the above poem and in the following:

Her lock-covered face the lost moon.

 

The chaperon they paid got drunk

And watched me in his dreams; she stayed

 

Teaching me the taste of her mouth

 

How are these desires and emotions any different than our own? They may precede us by 1,200 years and pass through the prism of a culture we don t or won t understand, but the human condition remains unchanged, and we are the worse for not recognizing this simple fact.

While Mu tazz was an heir to the throne, Ma arri was born into poverty in Syria in 973 C.E. At the age of four, he suffered smallpox and became blind. At fourteen, his father died. At libraries in Aleppo and Antioch, he learned works of literature by heart. At thirty-five, he went to Baghdad but soon returned to Syria perhaps because, in a disagreement with a nobleman over a famous poet from the prior century, he was dragged from the room by his ankles. Upon his return to Syria, he led an ascetic and vegetarian existence, living on lentils and figs, confined to the four walls of his house where he became an object of pilgrimage and disciples. Though few have heard of him in the West, he has been compared to Dante and Milton. A short sample from a longer lyric:

A man hard done by, yet generous,

Is a rock on which light rain falls;

Tufts of moss grow, but flowers won t bloom.

 

My copy of this book is now so worn I must open and close it with care, the pages loose in places, and the print of the introduction something so small I can no longer read it without reading glasses. In correspondence with Wightman, we both regretted the Iraq war and the cultural divide between West and East. For further reading, he suggested the translations of Omar Pound (Ezra s son) and The Elek Book of Oriental Verse, for which Wightman did the Arabic section. He noted again that successful simple poems are never simply attained.

One wrong word or inflection in a simple poem and it crumbles into banality. The poet walks an arete.

 

But, as he also noted, the reward is that simple poems can sometimes pack an unexpected punch and sometimes coil with surprising subtleties. In Ahnaf, Mu tazz, or Ma arri, neglected in the West, we have exactly that.

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