
The Hunt in Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic
Tom Verde
Jaroslav Stetkevych
2015, University of Notre Dame Press, 978-0-26804-151-9, $34 pb.
The hunt has long been a subject of artistic expression stretching back to the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, rendered in iron oxide some 17,300 years ago. Uniquely, representations of the hunt have endured in the Arabic-speaking world, not so much pictorially as poetically. So argues scholar Jaroslav Stetkevych in this probing study of a little-addressed topic which nonetheless suffuses Arab cultural history. Via his own translations and dissections of wide-ranging samples of the Arabic hunt poem—the tardiyyah—Stetkevych demonstrates how pre-Islamic motifs of “quest” were transformed by medieval Arabic poets into themes of yearning and pursuit. “We dashed out with our hound . . . in the heat of youth’s prime,” wrote the medieval poet Abu Nawas (d. 814 CE). Yet the dawn toward which the youthful hunting party rides “appeared from behind its veil/Like a gray-haired man’s face …,” alluding to the “dark foreboding of inescapable fate,” as Stetkevych observes. Tardiyyah, he argues, lived on in the modern free-verse poetry of Egypt’s Muhammad ‘Afifi Matar (d. 2010), among others, who transformed the traditional “hunt lyric into an allegory of the poet’s search … [for] proof of himself,” an artistic objective not so far removed from the cave paintings at Lascaux.
You may also be interested in...
Ancient Egyptians Still Have Things to Teach Us
Socrates and other Greek thinkers admired Egypt for its philosophical tradition. This new translation of a manuscript as old as the pyramids shows us why.The Great British Bake Off Winner Nadiya Hussain Gathers Global Recipes in Culinary Celebration of Ramadan
Nadiya Hussain's diverse recipes highlight the global unity of Muslim cultures and cuisines.Child's Play: Reconstructing Everyday Life of Youth in Ancient Egypt
Egyptologist Amandine Marshall observes how the depictions of children created by Ancient Egyptians seldom illustrated their actual lives.