Tonight at Poet’s House, the Library of Arabic Literature will celebrate the launch of War Songs. ArabLit founding editor M Lynx Qualey will be there; today, fresh reflections on the collection that first appeared in the LARB and are reprinted here with permission:
By Kevin Blankinship
War Songs: ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, trans. James Montgomery and Richard Sieburth (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2018)
War Songs: `Antarah Ibn Shaddad is the latest achievement of the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL), funded by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute. It joins a list of twenty-six titles with more to come. For each of these, a single scholar uses original manuscripts to create a reliable print edition and translate it to English, all in collaboration with accomplished Arabists. The books are published as elegant bilingual hardbacks and English-only paperbacks. For War Songs, professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge James Montgomery has teamed up with longtime translators Richard Sieburth and Peter Cole.
The poems themselves, along with Montgomery’s formidable apparatus of footnotes, atlases, and concordances, flesh out the world of `Antarah. He belonged to a class of pre-Islamic “rider-warriors” acting as local proxies in the desert backlands to the sixth century’s great powers, Rome and Persia. But those empires’ inability to control their own mercenaries led to the “instability and turmoil that characterized northern Arabia.” One consequence was the forty-year War of `Abs and Dhubyan, in which `Antarah became embroiled on the side of `Abs, his father’s clan. `Antarah’s voice gives us a firsthand account of the conflict, but more than that, it evokes an entire “cosmos of war,” demanding adherence to honor (`ird) by bravely confronting fate. “War was effectively a religion” Montgomery declares. Fighters like `Antarah were obsessed with their weapons, their warhorses, their battle gear, their spoils. And a key sacrament of this bloodsoaked religion was poetry, since it memorialized the poet and his tribe.
Improbably, readers have Hollywood to thank for an introduction to `Antarah. The push to translate his verse came when a production company phoned Philip Kennedy, the general editor of LAL, about an `Antarah movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. That project has since withered on the vine, but `Antarah persists as a pop culture phenomenon. A medieval folk epic, Sirat `Antar, was once a rival to the 1,001 Arabian Nights for popular appeal in Europe. Syrian director Rami Hanna made a 2008 TV series about him; Nigerian-American sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor released a graphic novel in April, Antar the Black Knight; and this fall, Moemen Helmy has brought out an Arabic language comic, `Antarah, drawn by Indian filmmaker Ashraf Gouri. Along with War Songs, these mass media portrayals make `Antarah poised to capture a whole new audience in the West.
***
An enemy squadron attacked.
My cavalry crushed it,
arms aglitter, hearts high—
silent agents of death . . .
Fearsome heroes, noble and strong
leaping into the fray
when testicles tighten.
In these lines we find what Peter Cole calls in his foreword to War Songs “action-hero or rapper-like over-the-topness, the artfully hyperbolic presentation of a fabled, contest-crazed figure,” falling into the same class as Achilles or Beowulf. There’s even an echo in poem 14 of the trope in contemporary hip hop of “spitting” rhymes, a verb absent in the original Arabic, but the image of smoke like a tongue is close enough. To a defeated foe, `Antarah says:
Like a volcano, I’ll spew
poems that long
after my death
will find and hold you
up to shame.
Thus, readers of War Songs will be disappointed if they expect Wordsworthian confessions from the depths of the poet’s soul. Our `Antarah is less a flesh-and-blood creature than an archetype, an “elemental force of nature” in Montgomery’s words. Here we should remember the need for `Antarah to prove himself, being the enslaved son of a slave mother. There is also the communal element of ancient Arabic poetry, in which the tribe, not the individual, formed the main focus. `Antarah’s boasts and insults, preposterous if taken as private reflections, were meant to stir animal spirits, to crush enemy morale, to beat the drum of war. We wouldn’t hold it against a modern-day general for not being nuanced or introspective when rousing his troops. Why, then, should we hold it against `Antarah?
***
I won’t be able
to outrun Fate
when she comes.
Cowards run.
I stand
my ground.
Here is the same blend of grit and fatalism that one finds in another Arab warrior, Tariq ibn Ziyad, the commander who led the Umayyad Muslim conquest of Visigothic Spain in 711 AD (his name gave us the word Gibraltar, from the Arabic jabal Tariq, “Tariq’s Mountain”). According to legend, Tariq robbed his army of escape by burning their ships after disembarking at Iberia, the better to steel their minds for battle. “My soldiers! Where will you flee?” cries Tariq in a speech said to have been made that day. “Behind you is the sea, and in front, the enemy!” Like `Antarah, confronted by death on all sides, Tariq looks it full in the face, knowing that such is the sole path to honor.
In vivid expression of this macabre encounter, Death itself—in Arabic, al-mawt, al-radā, al-maniyyah, and other names besides—becomes a character in `Antarah’s theater of war. Inescapable demise stalks the hero like the enemy tribesmen he fights, placing `Antarah in a double bind: He cannot escape, and he cannot turn away:
Death appeared.
I said to my men
“Who’s up for a wager?
Who’ll face death with me?”
Through repeated meets of this kind, `Antarah grows so intimate with Death that he is led—in the spirit of Oppenheimer’s remark upon seeing the first atomic bomb explode at New Mexico, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”—to identify with his own fate:
Death I know—it looks like me,
grim as battle, when warriors clash
on a packed field.
Here, the twofold meaning is instructive. `Antarah is equal to Death in that he both brings it to others and that he must eventually suffer it himself. On this basis, the poems pass frequently into graphic battlefield descriptions, reveling in carnage for its own sake. In poem 13, for instance, `Antarah jeers morbidly that “my soul, sick with bloodlust, was nearly healed”—but only nearly—as he mows down an entire enemy squadron in a cavalry charge. Some will grow squeamish at these scenes, unable or unwilling to recognize an uncomfortable fact: people are proud to kill for what they love, such as family or country, or what they crave, such as lucre or power.
***
Facing the certainty of death, `Antarah accepts, even welcomes his fate, knowing that any skirmish may be the last. He takes pleasure in honor secured, but also in trusting that his poetry will make his memory new for every generation, like the promise of Thetis that her son Achilles would have glory in the telling and retelling of his deeds. Perhaps the possibility of cheating death through words is what makes for such a rich company of warrior-poets in every language. This is certainly true of Arabic, as `Antarah’s odes attest.
War Songs is out next month from NYU Press.
Kevin Blankinship is Assistant Professor of Arabic in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. He researches and teaches Arabic language and literature in the context of the Mediterranean world. He also reviews books for general audiences, writes commentary on Middle Eastern culture and society, and works as a freelance translator. You can read his work at LARB Marginalia, Jadaliyya, and Bridges.
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