Classical Poems By Arab Women

A well designed and well-written book that brings Arabic women poets into focus. The bilingual text is a big help (even after four years of Arabic, I have to sit with a dictionary to read poetry), and the translator uses a technique he calls voicecopy. This captures the emotion of the Arabic and flows quite well in English. The result is a feeling of direct contact with the original and the personality who created it.This is a very enjoyable and insightful book, even if you do not read Arabic.

This is a brilliant collection, featuring a diverse collection of Arabic poetry dating from 4000 BCE (actually a single fragment of a poem), through the end of the Andalusian period (in 1492.) About 1/4 of the poems are from the Jahiliyya (pre-622), 1/4 from the 'Umayyad and Abbysid periods (661 - 1279), and half from Islamic Spain. Al-Udhans has compiled poetry that highlights a variety of poets - although many are more fragments (more reminiscent of Sappho than a full poem), there is much to enjoy here, as the imagery and themes are as varied as they are striking. What is particularly noteworthy is the compendium is dual-language, Arabic and English. A fantastic collection. Recommended.

loved being able to read the arabic and english side by side, and see all the amazing work Arab women have been doing throughout history

Book is lovely but it came damaged!! There's two blue stains on the cover

Highly reccomend!

While the work has some faults, they are rendered fairly negligible when considered with its successes. First, the span of time: it starts with a poem from 4000 bc and continues up to 1492. Although only one poem is from bc, that's one more than most anthologies of Arab poetry. Then, the span of poets: 11 poets just from 300ce-622ce (the pre-Islamic Jahiliyya), 11 more from 622-1258 (early Islamic period, Umayyad and Abbasid empires), and a whopping 22 from 711-1492 (Andalusian period). The Arabic text is printed with a lot of the classical diacritics, making reading it easier, with the translations facing. Most poets are represented by a single poem, and most poems are a couplet or quatrain, but there are some poets with multiple poems, just as there are some poems of some length. Included are brief biographical sketches introducing poet and/or poem. The main problem is, the sketches are printed above the translation, but the original always starts at the top of the page, so the original and the translation, while facing, are not flush, which throws the reading off a little bit. Also, in many cases, especially with the longer poems, the translator puts the translation into fewer lines than the original (like a 7 line English translation of a 9 line original). I do have faith in the fidelity of the translation, but it does make it harder for a reader to match the original to the translation when you translate that way. Also, a major fault in this book is that it contains no references: no footnotes, endnotes, sources - not even a bibliography. But it's not as if I can just say that the other bilingual anthology of classical poems by Arab women might be better to get, because there isn't one. As for this one, I feel really good about having it. You will too.

I thought the Introduction was very interesting but much of the poetry was banal and would be considered stand-up comedy today. The translation was awkward and made me yearn for someone who actually knew the English language. For some reason there are occasional artistic(?) splotches on some of the pages.As to the content of the poetry there was not enough meat on the bones. It made me appreciate the elliptical scraps of some of the stuff left us by Sappho. The quality of the poetry makes Rod Mckuen's poetry(?) seem like Wallace Stevens'.Hopefully another anthology will replace this one and it will contain more poems than nail parings.