The Seven Odes The First Chapter In Arabic Literature pdf download

The Seven Odes – The First Chapter in Arabic Literature   A. J. Arberry Litt.D., F.B.A.

THE SEVEN ODES – THE FIRST CHAPTER IN ARABIC LITERATURE

The Golden Poems

September 1780 William Jones, barrister, poet and linguist, wrote to his friend Edmund Cartwright: “The hurry of the general election to a professional man, has obliged me to suspend till another long vacation, two little works, which I hoped to finish in the remainder of this.

The first is a treatise On the Maritime Jurisprudence of the Athenians, illustrated by five speeches of Demosthenes in commercial causes; and the second, a dissertation On the Manners of the Arabians before the Time of Mahomet, illustrated by the seven poems, which were written in letters of gold, and suspended in the temple at Mecca, about the beginning of the sixth century.

When they are printed, I shall be proud in submitting them to your judgment, as their excellence is well known.’

This is the earliest extant reference to Jones’s intention to publish for the first time in print the poems which constitute the theme of the present book.

Since men’s motives in the work they undertake are at least as interesting as what they eventually achieve, it will not be superfluous to consider briefly the background to what a young Welshman, the son of a distinguished mathematician and the grandson of an Anglesey farmer, was proposing to attempt in the summer of 1780 but found himself obliged to postpone, as he then thought, for another year.

 Cart: wright was among those who had persuaded Jones to stand for parliament in the general election of 1780.

Lord North’s Tory administration seemed, at last, to be tottering to its fall; Whig hopes were high; the war in America was going from bad to not to worse;

and Jones, from the beginning an ardent and outspoken supporter of the ‘colonists” in their bid for independence, visualized a brilliant career in British politics as an opening before him.

But the academic voters of Oxford preferred another, and he prudently withdrew his candidature; that chapter in his changeful life ended almost before it fairly began.

Yet the enthusiasm which had inspired Julius Melesigonus (a fanciful anagram on Gulielmus Jonesius) to write his fiery Ad Libertatem Carmen, and to lose many votes for doing so, thought to recognize in the poetry of ancient Arabia that same spirit of sturdy independence and the love of freedom which animated Periclean Athens and Ciceronian Rome, mention the America of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

It was political partisanship, as much as _aesthetic appreciation, which urged him to bring the Golden Poems to the notice of the British public. ‘I should conceive,’ he was to write in his analysis of one of the seven odes, that the king of HIRA, who, like other tyrants, wished to make all men just but himself, and to leave all nations free but his own, had attempted to enslave the powerful tribe of TAGLEB and to appoint a prefect over them, but that the warlike possessors of the deserts and forests had openly dis- claimed his authority, and employed their principal leader and poet’ to send him defiance, and magnify their own independent spirit.’

Did Jones, who delighted in verbal masquerades, intend by these words an oblique reference to contemporary events?

He reinforced the same point in connexion with another of the odes: “This oration, or poem, or whatever it may be denominated, had its full effect on the mind of the royal umpire, who decided the cause in favor of the BECRITES, and lost his life for a decision apparently just.

He must have remarked the fiery split of the poet AMRU from the style of his eloquence, as CAESAR first dis- covered the impetuous vehemence of BRUTUS’s temper from his speech, delivered at Nice, in favor of the king Deiotarus;

but neither the Arabian nor the Roman tyrant was sufficiently on their guard against men, whom they had irritated even to fury.’ To was no are as a to meet to mean to am are remotest Would the British tyrant take warning?

Yet Jones’s interest in the Seven Poems new whim. As early as 1772, in the preface to his Poems, consisting chiefly of translations from the Asiatick languages, he had written (he was only twenty-six at the time, and would very shortly be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society):

“The seven Arabick elegies, that were hung up in the temple of Mecca, and of which there several fine copies at Oxford, would, no doubt, highly acceptable to the lovers of antiquity, and the admirers of native genius: but when I propose a translation of these Oriental pieces, work likely with success,

I only invite my readers, who have leisure and industry, the study of the languages, in which they have written, and very far from insinuating that I have the design of performing any part of the task myself.’

Again in his Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri, which began in 1767 and was published in 1774, he dilated eloquently in his Agent Latin on the merits of the minstrelsy of ancient Arabia.

But his pleading with the leisured and the learned produced no visible effect, and so with tempestuous energy, he applied his will to the herculean labor of editing and translating these famous poems, splendid indeed but of ferocious difficulty.

He did not after all wait for another long vacation to give him freedom from forensic preoccupations. The autumn of 1780 found him in Paris; while there, as he told his former pupil Lord Althorp, ‘I obtained access also to a fine manuscript in the royal library, which has given me a more perfect acquaintance with the of the ancient Arabians;

 and how little soever I may value mere philology, considered apart from the knowledge which it leads, yet I shall ever set a high price on these branches of learning, which make us acquainted with the human species in all its varieties.’  

On 12 November 1780 he able inform Cartwright: ‘I give you my word that your letters and verses have greatly encouraged me in proceeding as expeditiously as I am able, to send abroad my seven Arabian powers; and I propose to manners