The Epistle of Forgiveness. Abu l-'Ala al-Ma'arri
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that also marks the poems in his Luzūmiyyāt. Where al-Maʿarrī uses an obscure word, the translation also uses an unusual English word, if possible. Fidelity to the text therefore overrides readability at times. The translators have stayed as close as possible to the Arabic text and have never resorted, unlike predecessors such as Brackenbury, Meïssa, and Monteil, to summary, large-scale paraphrase, and blatant glossing over difficulties by simple omission (Brackenbury and Meïssa cannot be blamed for this, since they relied on Kaylānī’s edition, which leaves out everything that is difficult or obscure). Some concessions to English style and usage had to be made, of course. Thus we have not hesitated to make pronouns (the ubiquitous and often confusing “he,” “him,” and “his” of Arabic narrative) explicit in order to make it clear who or what is meant, wherever this seemed desirable. Very often, when al-Maʿarrī refers to Ibn al-Qāriḥ, we have rendered “he” as “the Sheikh.” Al-Maʿarrī’s language is difficult and not all problems have been solved. Arab editors and commentators can ignore them, or pretend they do not find them problematical rather than confess their ignorance (we suspect this is often the case); a translator cannot hide in the same manner. In the notes we have discussed some of our difficulties and doubts or professed our inability to understand the text.
Many such problems are found in the poetry quoted in the text. Both epistles contain much of it, most of it by other poets, although the poems recited by the demon Abū Hadrash in Risālat al-Ghufrān are obviously by al-Maʿarrī himself. Classical Arabic poetry always rhymes (normally with “monorhyme”: aaaaaa . . .), but our translations, with very few exceptions, do not use rhyme, which would normally be incompatible with accuracy; instead of the Arabic quantitative meters (not unlike those of ancient Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit) a loose English meter (e.g., iambic) has generally been chosen. In view of the difficulties of many verses and the fact that they do not contribute to the bare narrative, it is not surprising that all earlier translators drastically cut the verse. Needless to say, in the present translation nothing has been cut.
The two translators have collaborated closely. The English text of the translation, annotation, and introduction, was made by van Gelder, who was helped, in varying degrees, by predecessors such as Nicholson, Brackenbury, Meïssa, Dechico, and Monteil,53 by Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s excellent annotation, by Schoeler’s published, partial, German translation, and by his unpublished rough draft of the complete German translation of Part One. Van Gelder’s drafts were thoroughly revised by Schoeler and difficulties were discussed in frequent and fruitful email exchanges. The final English version was polished by two native speakers, Sheila Ottway and especially James Montgomery, our project editor at LAL. Translations from the Qurʾan are by van Gelder; they are marked by angle brackets (French quotation marks) to distinguish them from other quotations, just as in Arabic they are customarily given in special decorative “bow brackets.” English and Arabic titles of the various chapters have been added.
After the completion of Part One, the translators were made aware of a new translation into Italian of Part One, by Martino Diez, who kindly sent a copy. Unlike its predecessors, it is virtually complete and includes the various digressions on grammar, lexicon, and prosody; it is provided with informative notes. We could make only limited use of this excellent translation.
A Note on the Edition
Reynold A. Nicholson may have been the pioneer in studying The Epistle of Forgiveness and making scholars acquainted with it, but the towering figure in the field is without question the Egyptian scholar ʿĀʾishah ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (1913–98), who named herself Bint al-Shāṭiʾ (“Daughter of the Riverbank”54), and whose doctoral dissertation at the University of Cairo in 1950 became the basis for the first scholarly edition of the epistles by al-Maʿarrī and Ibn al-Qāriḥ. Her richly annotated edition, a monument of scholarship, appeared in 1954 (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif) and was republished several times with minor revisions. For the present bilingual edition it was decided not to duplicate her efforts, but to rely for the most part on her edition. The ninth edition that appeared in Cairo in 1993 forms the basis of the Arabic text offered here; we have also used some of her earlier editions, notably the third (Cairo, 1963) and fourth (Cairo, n.d.), because even though the later edition corrects some mistakes and inaccuracies, some new typographical errors have crept in occasionally. Furthermore, we have consulted other printed editions, all of them uncritical. Nicholson’s articles contain only selected parts of the Arabic text. The oldest of these printed texts is that by Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Hindiyyah, 1903); rather fully voweled, the edition is devoid of annotation and does not contain Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter. Kāmil Kaylānī, in an undated volume published in Cairo (Dār al-Maʿārif) in 1943, entitled Risālat al-Ghufrān li-l-shāʿir al-faylasūf Abī l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (The Epistle of Forgiveness by the poet-philosopher Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī), offered a shortened version of the epistles of Ibn al-Qāriḥ and al-Maʿarrī, stripped of most of the difficult passages, together with much relevant and sometimes irrelevant annotation and a selection of other epistles by al-Maʿarrī. Later editions, all uncritical, are obviously (but only rarely explicitly) dependent on Bint al-Shāṭiʾ: the lightly annotated one of Mufīd Qumayḥah (Beirut: Dār Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1406/1986, no indexes) and the more fully (but often erroneously) annotated one by Muḥammad al-Iskandarānī and Inʿām Fawwāl (Beirut: Dār al-Kātib al-ʿArabī, 2011/1432, provided with indexes).
In her critical edition of the two epistles Bint al-Shāṭiʾ explains that for Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Epistle she relied on two manuscripts from the Taymūriyyah collection in the National Library (Dār al-Kutub) in Cairo and one printed edition, the one incorporated by Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī in his collection Rasāʾil al-bulaghāʾ.55 The older, undated manuscript was apparently the basis for both the later one (copied in 1327/1909) and the edition in Rasāʾil al-bulaghāʾ, and Bint al-Shāṭiʾ took it as the basis for her own edition. We have also benefited from the only other critical edition of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle, part of the unpublished doctoral dissertation by Michel Dechico, which also contains a study and a translation.56
For her edition of Risālat al-Ghufrān, Bint al-Shāṭiʾ used seven manuscripts, as well as Nicholson’s publication and earlier printed editions. The most important manuscript, preserved in Istanbul, seems to date from the seventh/thirteenth century; its copyist remarks that he collated the text with a manuscript corrected by Abū Zakariyyā l-Tibrīzī, mentioned above as a pupil and great admirer of al-Maʿarrī, and an important scholar himself. The other manuscripts used by Bint al-Shāṭiʾ are obviously of less importance, being later, sometimes incomplete, and offering a less reliable text.
Bint al-Shāṭiʾ provides two kinds of footnotes. One supplies textual commentary, including meticulous, detailed information about variant readings in the manuscripts and parallel texts, occasional emendations, and glosses that explain difficult words. At times she cites Nicholson’s readings and interpretations, often with gratuitously scathing remarks when he was wrong. The other set of footnotes gives basic information on persons and places mentioned in the text. Even though her editorial practice has been criticized,57 altogether her notes display stupendous learning and she is almost always right. In our own annotation we have relied much on her notes, but we have not slavishly followed her and it would have been impossible simply to translate her annotation. The textual notes to the present Arabic edition only provide the main variants and those instances where we decided to deviate from Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s text; variants that are obviously scribal errors have been ignored. For detailed information about manuscript variants the reader is referred to Bint al-Shāṭiʾ’s edition. Where needed, explanations and justifications of our choices are found in the annotation to the English translation.
The original guidelines of the Library of Arabic Literature recommend that annotation be kept to a minimum. We are grateful to the editors for approving the increased volume of annotations included in the present work. Because of the difficulty of the present text and the plethora of names and allusions it contains, a great deal more explanation was considered essential; there would have been yet more if we had done full justice to the text. Instead, we have limited the annotation to a minimum. A full