Friday, January 28, 2011

Literary Types

            The difficulty of translation applied especially to Islamic poetry, which for centuries used traditional, rigid, and distinctive forms in a highly stylized way. Prose, in the Western sense of novels, short stories, and dramas, was not known in the Islamic world until the modern period. What prose writing there was also used specific forms, and often it, like poetry, was rhymed. This emphasis on form and style dominated Islamic literature until the early 19th century, frequently to the detriment of content.

           Classical Arabic poetry was built on the principle of the monorhyme, and the single rhyme was employed throughout a poem, whether it was long or short. Within the rhyming pattern, there were 16 basic meters in five groupings, but the poet was not allowed to change the meter in the course of a poem.

             The chief literary types, all poetic forms developed according to traditional rules, were the qasida, the ghazel, the qitah, the masnavi, and the roba`i. In prose, the chief genre was the maqamah.

         The qasida was developed by pre-Islamic Arabs and has endured in Arabic literary history up to the present. It consists of an elaborately structured ode of from 20 to 100 verses and maintains a single end rhyme through the entire piece. The poem opens with a short prelude, usually a love poem, to get the reader's attention. This is followed by an account of the poet's journey, with descriptions of his horse or camel and of desert scenes and events. The main theme, at the end, is a tribute to the poet's patron, his tribe, or even himself. After the coming of Islam, the qasida served as an instrument of praise to God, eulogies of Muhammad, and songs of commendation or lament for the saints. It was a type of poem that lent itself to displays of the poet's own knowledge.



  • The ghazel is a love lyric of from five to 12 verses that probably originated as an elaboration of the qasida's opening section. The content was religious, secular, or a combination of both.
  • The qitah is a literary form used for the less serious matters of everyday life. Its main function was for satire, jokes, word games, and codes.
  • The masnavi originated in Persia, a country with its own ancient literary tradition. The term means "the doubled one," or rhyming couplet. The masnavi became very popular because it enabled the poet to tell a long story by stringing together thousands of verses. It was the closest approach to the epic poem that developed in Islamic literature. The Arabs rejected the epic as a form of fiction, which they felt was akin to falsehood.
  • The roba`i also has its roots in pre-Islamic Persian poetic tradition. Its form is a quatrain (four-line verse) in which the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme. The most famous example of the roba`i is the `Rubáiyát' of Omar Khayyám.
  • The maqamah is the most typical expression of the Arabic spirit in rhymed prose. It was used to tell basically simple and entertaining stories in an extremely complicated style. Because the maqamah was frequently used to display the author's wit, learning, and eloquence, it often became so tangled in convoluted terminology and grammar that it was quite difficult to comprehend and therefore almost impossible to translate. Only in the late 19th century, under the influence of translations from the European languages, did its style take on a matter-of-fact manner that made it less artificial.

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