Arabian Satire: Poetry from 18tb-Century Najd.

• Author: Tamplin, William
• Position: Arabian Romantic: Poems on Bedouin Life and Love

Hmedan al-Shwe (c) ir. Arabian Satire: Poetry from 18tb-Century Najd. Edited and translated by MARCEL KURPERSHOEK. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. Pp. 1+ 198. $35.

(c) Abdallah Ibn Sbayyil. Arabian Romantic: Poems on Bedouin Life and Love. Edited and translated by MARCEL KURPERSHOEK. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. li +311. $35.

In the latest of his books on Nabati poetry, Marcel Kurpershoek offers a compilation of the selected poetry of Hmedan al-Shwe (c) ir, a date farmer whose life straddled the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of (c) Abdallah ibn Sbayyil, a village headman, who died in 1933 at around the age of 80. Both men--the satirist and the romantic, respectively--wrote dialectal Arabic poetry that sheds light on their lives and times as commoners in Najd alongside the waxing of the Saudi and Wahhabi establishments. And with his unpretentious and eminently readable erudition, Kurpershoek has made their worlds come alive. Both volumes feature introductions containing short biographies of the poets alongside notable aspects of their poetry; the carefully edited Arabic text of the poems; interpretive and apt translations; learned footnotes; glossaries of the names of relevant people and places; and an index of the poems according to their first lines, meters, and manuscript sources.

Kurpershoek claims convincingly that both Hmedan's and Ibn Sbayyil's poetic visions represent something quintessential about the Najdi spirit. Kurpershoek writes that Hmedan's poetry is an excellent "source for insight into the mental outlook of townspeople in Central Arabia before the reform movement launched in 1745 by the preaching of Muhammad ibn (c) Abd al-Wahhab" (Arabian Satire, ix). Because both seventeenth-century and contemporary Najdis share a stock of proverbs, Kurpershoek concludes that "that era remains in many respects the bedrock of current Najdi mentality" (ibid., xxviii). Like all great poets, both Hmedan and Ibn Sbayyil clove to tradition as they struck forth anew. Hmedan subverted the tired tropes of the Arabian fakhr or madh traditions by exposing miserliness and hypocrisy. Two centuries later, Ibn Sbayyil dusted off similarly tired tropes in the Arabian ghazal tradition and breathed new life into them with his conceits.

Marcel Kurpershoek is a master of the sources. After completing a PhD in Arabic literature, Kurpershoek spent his career as a Dutch diplomat throughout the Middle East. His footnotes attest to a life spent between the ivory tower (or the diplomatic compound) and the Arab street. They are...