It’s a handsome volume* with gloriously voweled Arabic texts opposite English versions by James E. Montgomery, Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity Hall. The poems are by, and attributed to, Abū Nuwās, “arguably the greatest poet of the Arabic language.” This isn’t a review; I’m only starting the book, and these are just some thoughts at the outset.

The Introduction to Abū Nuwās, A Demon Spirit: Arabic Hunting Poems is dense, and parts of it are hard to read:

For all its humanizing strategies and its apparent inability to avoid being interested in the nonhuman only insofar as it is a reflection of what is significant to the human, the poem suggests a different way of conceiving relationality.

The Introduction suggests that the reader paying close attention to the particularities of the Arabic text may need to brace for a lack of transparency in the translator’s English “renderings”:

“… I have prioritized clarity… in an English I have endeavoured to keep uncluttered and economical. I aimed for English renderings that could stand on their own… There remain many poems and lines that are obscure… Consequently, much of my translation remains conjectural, and in such instances I have dispensed with endnotes that signpost my failings.

 I’m not sure what “stand on their own” means. Will these translations resemble “imitations” in the vein of a Robert Lowell? As a student of Arabic, that source text on the lefthand page beckons to me like the Sierra Madre. Will I bark up coon-less trees, chasing source-target “relationalities” where none were possible or intended — just because the translator didn’t want to “signpost his failings” with endnotes? (The Introduction has 65 of them!) Let’s face it: In a sense, all poetry translation is conjectural, premised on more or less astute failings. 

 The book’s first poem is one of nine “description(s) of the dog” (na^t(u)-l-kalb(i)). The dog is the saluki hound used in ancient Arabian hunting. Here’s my transliteration and literal English version:

[qāl(a) yan^at(u)-hu [‘ar-rajaz]
He said describing it [‘ar-rajaz (a poetic meter)]

[‘an^at(u) kalb(an) ‘ahl(u)-hu fī kadd(i)-hi]
I describe a dog whose people are in his toil.

[qad sa^id(at) judūd(u)-hum bi-jadd(i)-hi]
Happy were their fortunes with his good luck,

[fa-kull(u) ẖair(in) ^inda-hum min ^indi-hi]
for every good in them was from in him,

[wa-kull(u) rifd(in) ^inda-hum min rifd(i)-hi]
and every gift in them was from his gift.

[yaḍall(u) maulā-hu la-hu ka-^abd(i)-hi]
His master is become for him like his slave.

[yabīt(u) ‘adnā ṣāḥib(in) min mahd(i)-hi]
Nights he spends in greater closeness of an owner than his bed,
(My English here is neither uncluttered nor economical per Montgomery’s manifesto, but I’m at pains to preserve the annexed state of the comparative adjective by the following noun in undetermined genitive case.)

[wa-‘in ḡadā jallal(a)-hu bi-burd(i)-hi]
and if he goes out at dawn, he wraps him in his cloak.
(Hunts were inititated at dawn, and the “dawn hunt” was a trope of the genre.)

[ḏā ḡurraẗ(in) muḥajjal(an) bi-zand(i)-hi]
Possessed of a blazed face, white-footed on his foreleg,

[talaḏḏ(u) min-hu-l-^ain(u) ḥusn(a) qadd(i)-hi]
gratified by him is the eye, by the beauty of his shape,

[ta’ẖīr(a) šidq(ai)-hi wa-ṭūl(a) ẖadd(i)-hi]
the drawing back both corners of his mouth, the length of his cheeks.

[talq(ā)-ẓ-ẓibā’(u) ^anat(an) min ṭard(i)-hi
The gazelles meet misery from his hounding.
(I wonder why Montgomery transliterates the word for “gazelle” (ẓaby — see below), whose plural ẓibā’ appears in the line.)

[tašrab(u) ka’s(a) šadd(i)-hā bi-šadd(i)-hi]
They drink a cup of their running with his charge.

[yaṣīd(u)-nā ^išr(īna) fī murqadd(i)-hi]
He hunts down for us twenty in his murqadd (?).
(None of my sources help me with murqadd. Is it correctly pointed? Without the šadda which doubles the final consonant, the word could be the Form 4 passive participle of root r-q-d with a meaning such as “being made to sleep.” That doesn’t make loads of sense for the line, but at least it’s a plausible form. Montgomery’s phrase “in a single run” (see below) doesn’t come to grips with murqadd so far as I can tell.)

[yā la-ka min kalb(in nasīj(i) waḥd(i)-hi]
What a dog you are! One of a kind!
(The phrase nasīj(i) waḥd(i)-hi is listed in Wehr, an instance of how ancient usage persists to modern times. The meanings given are “unique in his (its) kind, singular, unparalleled.” Nasīj can be “a woven fabric, a textile.” The term waḥd centers around a concept of “oneness.” I like to think of “cut from singular cloth” as a possible description for the swift, handsome, lethal hunting hound that Abū Nuwās apostrophisizes.)

Professor Montgomery’s zesty rendering has the last word, as befits:

In His Gift
I sing of a dog who feeds his folk—
good fortune and well-being are in his gift.
His master sleeps by his bed, wraps him in his cloak
on dawn hunts, and waits on him like a slave.
The eye exults in his beauty: the bright blaze
on his head, his white forelegs, fire-stick
thin, his long cheek, his scissor bite.
He brings death to the ẓabys
drinking their speed to the dregs,
felling twenty in a single run.
What a dog you are — the best of dogs!

*Abu Nuwas, A Demon Spirit: Arabic Hunting Poems, edited and translated by James E. Montgomery, New York University Press, 2024.

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