Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn

Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn (Banners of the Champions and the Standards of the Distinguished, also translated as Pennants of the Champions) is a thirteenth-century anthology of Arabic Andalucian poetry by Ibn Said al-Maghribi.[1] It is, in the words of Louis Crompton, 'perhaps the most important' of the various medieval Andalucian poetry anthologies.[2] 'His aim in compiling the collection seems to have been to show that poetry produced in the West was as good as anything the East had to offer (and that stuff by Ibn Sa'id and his family was especially good)'.[1] It survives today in only one manuscript.[3]

Date

The Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn is part of the fifteen-volume al-Mughrib fī ḥulā l-Maghrib ('The Extraordinary Book on the Adornments of the West'), whose compilation Ibn Said completed. But the Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn also circulated separately. Ibn Said compiled Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn in Cairo, completing it on 21 June 1243 (641 by Islamic dating).[4] Its patron and dedicatee was Musā ibn Yaghmūr (1203-65).

Method

Ibn Said wrote that he wished to include only those few fragments "whose idea is more subtle than the West Wind, and whose language is more beautiful than a pretty face."[5] The poetry chosen all in the classical style, following 'all the traditional conventions of ryme, meter, and lexicon' and excluding colloquial verse.[6]

The anthology is arranged according to home and occupation of the writer, proceeding through western, central, and eastern Spain, to Ibiza, North Africa, and then Sicily. It thus covers the whole of the Andalusian world, including Alcalá, Córdoba, Granada, Lisbon, Murcia, Zaragoza, Seville, Toledo, and Valencia. Within each region, the poems are ordered by city, and then by the poet's occupation, from the highest social rank to the lowest.[7] Authors include bureaucrats, gentlemen, kings, ministers, and scholars; the book is evidence of how important love poetry was to the educated of al-Andalus. In all, the anthology contains 314 poetic fragments by 145 identifiable poets; Ibn Said also included a prologue and a short epilogue, along with occasional comments on the texts and brief notes on the poets.

According to A. J. Arberry.

the author has exercised, and everywhere demonstrates, his personal judgement, first as to the poets selected for quotation, and secondly as to the passages chosen. He was not able to deny himself the immodest pleasure of quoting from his own writings, for more extensively than from those of any other poet; and the entire section devoted to Alcalá la Real is taken up with the products of members of his family ... It seems doubtful whether more than a small handful of poems have been cited in their entirety; most of the quotations are quite brief extracts---in some instances a single stanza---from what were originally lengthy compositions.[8]

Example

An excerpt from a poem of the Pennants, "The Tailor's Apprentice" by Ibn Kharuf (d. 1205), in Arberry's translation, serves as one example:

His stool, the steed he rides upon
Rejoices in its champion
Armed with the needle that he plies
Sharp as the lashes of his eyes.

The needle o'er the silken dress
Careers with wondrous nimbleness
As down the sky bright meteors snake.

With threads of lightening in their wake.[9]

Influence

Gómez's translation greatly influenced modern Spanish poetry, not least Lorca, whose El diván del Tamarit was particularly indebted to the book.[5]

Editions and translations

The work was edited in 1942 by Emilio García Gómez, who also provided a Spanish translation.[10] It was re-edited in 1973 by Numan Abd al-Mutaal al-Qadi.[11]

A selection of its poems was translated into English by A. J. Arberry, making the anthology for decades one of the most available collections of medieval Arabic poetry available in English. Arberry seems to have avoided including poems with particularly explicit sexual (especially homosexual) content, however.

The anthology was subsequently translated into English by James Bellamy and Patricia Steiner.[12]

References

  1. 1 2 Robert Irwin, The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 301.
  2. ↑ Louis Crompton, 'Male Love and Islamic Law in Arab Spain', in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, ed. by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 142-58 (at p. 154).
  3. ↑ Moorish Poetry: A Translation of 'The Pennants', an Anthology Compiled in 1243 by the Andalusian Ibn Sa'id, trans. by A. J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. ix.
  4. ↑ Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn/The Banners of the Champions: An Anthology of Medieval Arabic Poetry from Andalusia and Beyond, selected and translated by James A. Bellamy and Patricia Owen Steiner (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1989), p. xxi.
  5. 1 2 Gómez, translated by Cola Franzen from the Spanish versions of Emilio García (1989). Poems of Arab Andalusia. San Francisco: City Lights Books. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-87286-242-5.
  6. ↑ Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn/The Banners of the Champions: An Anthology of Medieval Arabic Poetry from Andalusia and Beyond, selected and translated by James A. Bellamy and Patricia Owen Steiner (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1989), p. xxii.
  7. ↑ Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn/The Banners of the Champions: An Anthology of Medieval Arabic Poetry from Andalusia and Beyond, selected and translated by James A. Bellamy and Patricia Owen Steiner (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1989), p. xxii.
  8. ↑ Moorish Poetry: A Translation of 'The Pennants', an Anthology Compiled in 1243 by the Andalusian Ibn Sa'id, trans. by A. J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. x-xi.
  9. ↑ Moorish Poetry: A Translation of 'The Pennants', an Anthology Compiled in 1243 by the Andalusian Ibn Sa'id, trans. by A. J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 75.
  10. ↑ El libro de las banderas de los campeones, de Ibn Saʿid al-Magribī, ed. by Emilio García Gómez (Madrid: Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, 1942).
  11. ↑ Ibn Said al-Andalusi, Rayat al-Mubarrazin wa gayat al-Mummayazin, ed. by Numan Abd al-Mutaal al-Qadi (El Cairo: Yina al-Turat al-Islami, 1973).
  12. ↑ The Banners of the Champions of Ibn Said al-Maghribi, translated by James Bellamy and Patricia Steiner (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1988).
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