Abu Bakr al-Suli. The Life and Times of Abu Tammam.

• Author: Fakhreddine, Huda
• Position: Book review

Abu Bakr al-Suli. The Life and Times of Abu Tammam. Edited and translated by BEATRICE GRUENDLER. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. Pp. xxx + 421. $40.

Beatrice Gruendler opens her introduction to the volume under review with a quotation from Virginia Woolf's diary. Recalling Katherine Mansfield's reaction to Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf wrote that, regardless of how subjective they may be, such reactions "should figure [...] in the history of literature" (p. xiii). And what constitutes the history of literature more than the reaction it elicits from its readers, writers, and critics, from both contemporaries and those who continue to discover it across time? Abu Tammam, the Abbasid poet and anthologist, and probably one of the most controversial poets of his era, provoked extreme reactions from his readers and critics. His contribution as a poet and rewriter of his poetic tradition was a counterpoint in the life of Arabic poetry. Abu Bakr al-Suli's (d. 335/947) Akhbar Abi Tammam, published now as The Life and Times of Abu Tammam, is a book as much about the impact of Abu Tammam's poetry on contemporaries as it is about the ongoing intervention of his project in the life of Arabic poetry to this day.

This edition and translation is another welcome addition to the Library of Arabic Literature, a series funded by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi and published by NYU Press. The volumes published thus far range in topic from religion, science, poetry, history, and historiography, and some have already received considerable recognition and celebration. In the field of Arabic poetry and poetics in general, and classical Arabic poetry and criticism in particular, I expect the impact of this project to be groundbreaking. The study of Arabic poetry, both modern and classical, has the potential of being significantly affected by the introduction of voices like al-Suli's, especially when presented in fresh and timely translations as is the case here.

The editor and translator, Beatrice Gruendler, has succeeded in communicating the urgency of al-Suli's work; its ninth-century Abbasid context has been smoothly transposed to readers in the twenty-first century. The discourse on modernizing trends in the Arabic poetic tradition, and their relationship to and their effect on that tradition, will benefit from this publication, as will scholars of modern Arabic poetic forms, such as the free verse poem and the...