your honor’s good promises are reliable; his judgment fair, firm, and equitable; his bounty free, copious, and unstinting; assured his magnanimity will triumph — his valiant heart prevail — the entire world admit his virtue — I praise you, aspiring to favor; I acclaim you, contemplating gain; I implore you, pleading for charity — I, aged, shrunken, diminished, hapless! Jealously seeking consideration, I offer maiden verses that merit bridegifts. Manifestly, my rights are clear, my demands few. Couplets of praise will benefit you; verses of reproach will damage your reputation.
I invoke my famished, ragged, miserable children—alas!—and, Sir, my pathetic, heartbroken, troubled self, emaciated, sorrowful, lachrymose, and tormented; hopes deferred, wishes denied, foes ravenous, comfort gone. Constant in affection, I merit no rebuff; ever loyal, I deserve fair return; my devotion is fervent, my attachment unwavering. Remember, Sir, that safeguarding one’s honor never demands high-handedly abusing another’s. Reward my fealty by approving my petition; in return, your praise will traverse the inhabited world. Prosper as guarantor of safety, live generously and relieve the afflicted, kindly assist an aging man! Enjoy a bounteous life, reveling in pleasure until assemblies go defunct and petitioners stop requesting help. Salut!
6.7By the time he reached his leaf-writ’s end, the newcomer had shown his mettle on the field. Now welcoming and warm, the gathered mooters showed him thanks in word and deed. Then they asked: “Whose kin are you? And from what crack did you climb?” To answer he sang:
Of Ghassan come I, Sarooj my home,
My clan a sun upon the land;
But I, like father Adam, banned
From distant Eden, lost I come.
How great it is what I have lost:
The days I dragged sweet pleasure’s train
Across a meadow full of rain;
That blessing I remember most.
What knew I then of loss and pain?
‘T were merciful, if pain might kill.
But I do ache, and yet live still,
Each dawn to rise and mourn again.
‘Tis better to die proud than lead
A skulking, shabby, bestial life;
To bring swift end to earthly strife,
Than from a thousand cruelties bleed.
Soon thereafter, tidings of him reached the reeve. He filled his mouth with sea-stones and sought him for an around-man, to take headship of the writ-craft house. But pride held him aloof from king-work, and the gifts made him happy enough.
6.8Harald Hammamson went on:
Even before the outsider sprung his trap, I’d known him by the cut of his jib. I nearly blurted his name out, but he’d stopped me with a wink that held my tongue. Then he won the word-spin and came forth with his back sore bent by a well-stuffed sack. Giving him his guest-right, I walked him to the gate, but called him out along the way for scorning king-work. He smiled and hummed this lay:
Remember David’s lesson just:
“In princes never put thy trust.”
I always keep a due decorum
But never stand in awe before ‘em;
I’d rather slip aside and choose
To talk with wits in dirty shoes.
For oh! how short are human schemes
That put their trust in princes’ dreams!
Glossary
6.1
moot a meeting, an assembly of people, esp. one for judicial or legislative purposes
reed-reeves princes of the pen
leaf-writ a document, specifically a risālah, any piece of correspondence generated by government secretaries
6.2
nock place the arrow on the bow
palm-apple date
6.3
scrut scrutinize
6.5
happenlore a qiṣṣah, a request for relief, along with an explanation of the circumstances, sent to a judicial official
rede advice
6.6
book-black ink
seed-wool cotton
Notes
Being specific to the Arabic script, the alternating-dots constraint has stumped Ḥarīrī’s translators. Al-Ḥarīzī admits that he is unable to replicate it in Hebrew (which also uses dots, but for different reasons) and simply paraphrases the petition (ed. Chenery, 16). Rückert, who elsewhere substitutes a German constraint for an Arabic one, appears not to do so here. He notes that the challenge is to avoid certain letters, but he does not explain which ones or why (und in welchem Ganz der Buchstab ist vermieden—den auszusprechen dir nicht ist beschieden, 34). As far as I can tell, his translation of the petition does not follow any constraint: it contains all the letters of the German alphabet except q and x, which are relatively rare and easily avoided. Chenery, as usual, gives a literal rendering of the text and explains the trick without trying to duplicate it. Preston, who omits all the other maqāmāt that contain formal manipulations of this kind, does translate this one. But he calls his rendering of the petition “necessarily very jejune” because “it is impossible to convey in English” anything like the alternation of dotted and undotted words (Makamat, p. 323, n. 3; see also p. 311, n. 1).
Of course English does have two dotted letters, i and j. In theory, therefore, Abū Zayd’s feat could be imitated by writing something like “i came, i saw, i conquered,” and so on for about two hundred words, using an E. E. Cummings–style lowercase i to supply the dot. But this solution makes it practically impossible to convey any of the original meaning. My Germanic–Romance solution, conversely, sacrifices the visual dimension of al-Ḥarīrī’s constraint. This I have tried to reproduce in my Englishing of Imposture 26, where Abū Zayd must alternate dotted and undotted letters.
In the narration, the Germanic-only constraint allowed me to use functional words like articles and pronouns, and most basic verbs. For other words, I consulted The
