The Life and Times of Abu Tammam. Abu Bakr al-Suli
phases and its contrasting styles, its cohorts of sponsors and scholars, its debates and controversies, comes into remarkably clear focus in his graphically documented account.
Before moving from this broad comparative perspective to Abū Tammām’s life and work as a poet, one other key point needs to be made. Poetry, together with everything that it represents—memorialization, cultural intelligence, linguistic precision, communicative flair, presence of mind, transmission of experience—is central to this culture in ways and to an extent that are perhaps hard to fathom for our instrumentalized, functionalized world. It is overwhelmingly clear, even on the sole testimony of this book, that poetry mattered to society at large, not only to poets and a few cultivated patrons, but across a spectrum that included government officials and administrators, merchants, servants, slaves. It is a currency, representing an imaginative capital that depends on constant reassessment and recalibration. It is inextricably enmeshed with the personal politics of those in power and their clients. Its value both as a practice and as a conserved treasure (“Rhymes and great deeds last forever”) is absolutely taken for granted. No one in that era thinks of arguing that the aesthetic sphere is, or should be, disjoined from the public sphere. No one would have believed that poetry was somehow merely showy language, a game of commerce and elitist rivalry. The value that poetry had as a medium of communication could only have been derived from the sense of authenticity that it delivered. Hence, again, the chains of testimonials, the eye-witness records, the scenes of friction between the patrons and their clients, or between rival clients, and the long-remembered moments of consummate performance: together, they constitute an extraordinary demonstration of the binding power of poetry in the human ecology.
• • •
… poetry pours from men’s minds:
when one group of clouds departs, another follows. (§69.3)
Although Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī’s “life” of Abū Tammām is not a biographical narrative, it contains many biographical episodes, chosen for their relevance to the compiler’s purpose, and hence presented in an order which is thematic rather than chronological. After the introductory epistle, the book opens with an extended section bearing witness to the poet’s superiority, then moves on to episodes detailing his dealings with a number of leading contemporary figures. It is only in the final sections of the compilation that we find some fragments of biography proper—remarks about Abū Tammām’s physical appearance and voice (§156: “he spoke smoothly and eloquently like the Bedouin”), the somewhat uncertain date of his birth, the mediocre poetry of his brother and his son, and his apparently quite sudden death at the age of around forty;the lamentations that ensued, endorsing his eminent place in the canon of Arabic poetry, are transcribed in a concluding section. The celebration of his brilliance as a poet and the disparagement of those who take a different view thus remains the central thread of the whole work; a good deal of this encomiastic strategy is in fact already outlined in the lengthy “Epistle to Abū l-Layth Muzāhim ibn Fātik” which serves as a general preface and an advertisement for al-Ṣūlī’s own work as compiler and editor.
As Beatrice Gruendler’s Introduction indicates, a key issue which emerges repeatedly in al-Ṣūlī’s account of Abū Tammām’s merits is the question of what in the European Renaissance is called “imitation” (imitatio, the recycling of materials from earlier writers). No one in either culture expected poets to be uncompromisingly “original.” The tradition within which they worked supplied genres, poetic forms, themes, and modes of treatment. Recognition of familiar tropes, techniques, and themes was precisely the objective of the intensive activity of memorizing, repetition, reworking, and editorial documentation to which this book bears witness. What was constantly recalibrated and renegotiated was, on the one hand, the borderline between plagiarism, literary theft, and authentic imitation, and on the other, the acceptability or otherwise of unexpected departures from the norm.
These debates are never, in this work at least, general and theoretical. They are particular, focusing on the agency and credit of individuals. Theories of “the death of the author” and “intertextuality” would have seemed strange and perverse to the actors in this culture; so would the post-Romantic or modernist notion of “originality.” In a typical scene of performance, the Abbasid poet ʿUmārah ibn ʿAqīl, famed for the purity of his language, recites one of his own poems to his friends and receives their unqualified praise (§50.1): “We never heard a poem better than this one rhyming in R. God favor you, ʿUmārah!” The poet counters by citing an R poem by Abū Tammām which, he says, has “blown away any poem in its style.” One of those present knows it by heart and recites extracts from it, interspersed with comments on its merits: “How brilliant, by God,” said ʿUmārah, “he found what had been lost to other poets, as if it had been set aside for him.” This extraordinary remark takes for granted that poetic materials and poetic language form an existing reservoir; the “finding” that ʿUmārah refers to (again like the inventio of Renaissance poetics and rhetoric) is an authentic innovation within the spectrum of what is poetically possible and legitimate.
In scenes of performance such as this, or in the account of Abū Tammām’s recitation of his Amorium ode, a great deal will be lost to a reader unfamiliar with the techniques of classical Arabic poetry (the R-rhyme, for example), or indeed with the Arabic language itself. Yet the thrill of the performance as such is still palpable, even in translation, together with the passionate commitment of the audiences and commentators. And as one reads and re-reads these consummate artifacts produced by one of the most vibrant and exhilarating cultures of the known world, something begins to emerge: the poetry begins to come alive, despite the strangeness of its diction and the loss of essential contexts. There are memories here of the wanderings and lifestyle of the Bedouin tribes, their poets (the “ancients”), and their ready wit (§49.1). There is a potent blend of cultural and ethical values—generosity, wealth, power, violence, revenge. There are sudden turns of phrase that deliver a momentary insight into the possible relations in this culture between belief and counter-belief: “Wisdom is the believer’s lost camel. Retrieve your lost camel, even from the polytheists” (§199). There are personal rivalries in the pursuit of the highest fees and the most exquisite phrasings. There is praise and insult, desire both heterosexual and homosexual. There is the flavor of date wine (§§91.1–5), the texture of fabrics, and how it felt to wear them (§§92.1–5):
We were dressed in the garb of summer
by a generous man whose own garb is noble and heroic deeds.
A Sābirī gown and a tunic
like eggshells or snakeskin,
Like a shimmering mirage in its beauty
but unlike its false promise.
Finest linen, trembling in the wind
by unknown Fate’s heeded command,
Fluttering, as if it were ever
the heart of a man in love or the innards of a man in fear.
Hugging the body,
It seems part of your ribs and elbows. (§92.2)
In these ways, the poems and their settings afford moments of intense communication, the transmission of experience and values across cultural borders. There is indeed a real sense in which Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī’s book inserts us, as readers from another world, into the chains of personal memory and testimony by means of which the author authenticates his materials and advertises their enduring value. Listen, for example, to this sequence from the section entitled “Abu Tammām as a Source”:
We cite Aḥmad, citing Aḥmad, citing Abū Tammām, who cites ʿAmr ibn Hāshim al-Sarawī as follows:
We were talking at Muḥammad ibn ʿAmr al-Awzāʿī’s place […]. A Bedouin from the tribe of ʿUlaym ibn Janāb was present but did not say a word. “You have rightly been called the most taciturn of Bedouins,” we said to him. “Will you not talk to the group?”
“One man profits from his ear,” the Bedouin replied. “The others profit