Ḥamda bint Ziyād al-Muʾaddib (Arabic: حمدة بنت زياد المؤدب) was a twelfth-century Andalusian poet from Guadix,[1] sister of Zaynab bint Ziyad al-Muʾaddib,[2] and described by the seventeenth-century diplomat Mohammed ibn abd al-Wahab al-Ghassani as 'one of the poetesses of the Andalus. She is famous in that region and among all the poets and poetesses of the country.'[3] Her father was a teacher (mu'addib),[4] and she is described as being one of 'the brotherless only daughters of well-off and cultured fathers who gave them the education that they would have given to their male children, if they had had any'.[5] She is one of relatively few named Moorish women poets.
Example
One example of Hamda's work is the poem referred to by A. J. Arberry as 'Beside a Stream', given here in his translation:[6]
- I sat beside a stream
- Of loveliness supreme,
- And with my tears expressed
- The secrets of my breast.
- A mead of emerald
- About each river rolled,
- And every meadow round
- A silver river wound.
- Among the shy gazelles
- Ran lovely fawns, whose spells
- Enslaved my mind, whose art
- Bewitching stole my heart.
- They lulled their eyes asleep
- But for a purpose deep
- Which (as true lover knows)
- Denies me all repose.
- They let their tresses fall
- And there, as I recall,
- Into the jet-black skies
- I saw a moon arise.
- The dawn, methinks, bereaved
- Of so dear brother, grieved
- For so sad loss, and so
- Put on the garb of woe.
This can be compared with Nabil Matar's translation of the same poem:[7]
- Tears have betrayed my secrets in a wadi [valley] whose beauty is striking;
- A river surrounds every meadow; and every meadow borders every wadi;
- Among the gazelle, a black fawn stole my mind, after stealing my heart;
- She desires to lie down for a reason, and that reason prevents my sleep;
- When she loosens her tufts, I see the full moon in the black clouds,
- As if the dawn had lost a brother, and in sorrow, clothed itself in mourning.
References
- ^ Shari L. Lowin, Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in Al-Andalus (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 41, n. 117.
- ^ Vicente Cantarino, ' "Wa-hiya taklifu ghannat": Genre and Gender in Hispano-Arabic Poetry', in Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context, ed. by William D. Paden (2000), p. 259.
- ^ In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century, ed. by Nabil Matar (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), p. 128.
- ^ hispano - arabic poetry. Slatkine. 1970.
- ^ María Jesús Rubiera, 'Oficios nobles, oficios viles', La mujer en al-Andalus, 72, cited by María Luisa Ávila, 'Women in Andalusi Biographical Sources', in Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources, ed. by Manuela Marín and Randi Deguilhem (London: Tauris, 2002), pp. 149-64 (p. 156).
- ^ Moorish Poetry: A Translation of ’The Pennants’, an Anthology Compiled in 1243 by the Andalusian Ibn Saʿid, trans. by A. J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 98. For the original see El libro de las banderas de los campeones, de Ibn Saʿid al-Magribī, ed. by Emilio García Gómez (Madrid: Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, 1942).
- ^ In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century, ed. by Nabil Matar (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), p. 127.
This page was last edited on 12 September 2023, at 06:27