The Poetry of Ibn Khafajah: A Literary Analysis.

• Author: Schippers, Arie

Ibn Khafajah (1058-1139), the famous poet of al-Andalus, lived an apparently uneventful life, uninvolved in the politics of his time. Around the age of 64, he decided to collect his Diwan, with his own preface in which he explains by whom his poetry is influenced. The present book by Magda M. Al-Nowaihi (originally a thesis at Harvard) focusses on the main elements of Ibn Khafajah's style: imagery, rhetorical devices, and syntax and structure.

The first chapter deals with imagery, its content and formulation. The subject-matter of Ibn Khafajah's imagery is divided between Arabian or Bedouin subjects, on the one hand (taken over from the world of poetry), and Andalusian subjects, on the other (nature and gardens experienced by the poet himself). Here two main trends are seen: the humanization of nature and the interprojection of microcosm and macrocosm (both notions coined by Burgel). Al-Nowaihi illustrates the above-mentioned subjects with numerous examples from Ibn Khafajah's poetry.

As far as the formulation of the image is concerned, the author recognizes four types: 1. explicit images (with ka- "like"; kada "almost"; or layta "if only"); 2. genitive metaphors, that closely associate the subject with the analogue; 3. images that create a confusion between the worlds of imagination and reality; 4. implied and hinted-at images. Just as Henrichs did earlier, the author identifies two different techniques of generating imagery: the ancient poet starts from an analogy and projects the analogue on the topic, creating a natural image; the modern (muhdath) poet constructs an imaginary element by taking an already existing metaphor, extracting new, often imaginary, metaphors from existing ones. Al-Nowaihi also goes into the function of imagery: the interprojection of microcosms and macrocosms brings the world of man and the universe closer together, and makes the remote and incomprehensible more immediate and comprehensible. Imagery also plays an important role as an element of structure or as a unifying device (cf. the water imagery in poem no. 150 [ed. Ghazi, pp. 198-202]; or the departure and travel images in the elegiac poem no. 165 [pp. 217-21]). Al-Nowaihi concludes that most of Ibn Khafajah's images are not fantastic in the sense meant by von Grunebaum and Heinrichs. In spite of some that are far-fetched, "the majority of his images are meaningful and have a purpose within his poetic universe."

The second chapter deals with rhetorical...