A Poem by an-Nābighah adh-Dhubyānī Translated by Robin Moger

The poem below is a set of texts (the majority translations from Arabic) which directly or indirectly address what is sometimes referred to as the Qas īdah of al-Mutajarridah (The Unclothed or Stripped Bare, supposedly the name of the wife of the last of the Lakhmid kings, an-Nuʿmān Ibn Mundhir) and the 6th-century poet to whom it is attributed, anNābighah adh-Dhubyānī. It consists of an introductory section, the body of the qas īdah itself, and marginal notes; three strands conceived as a single composition—a constellation: something that can be readily identified at a distance, but whose structures and certainties are harder to hold on to the longer we watch and the closer we come. It is the second of this series of translations to be published. The first, a translation of a qas īdah by Dhū r-Rummah titled [No Malice In Their Violence], appeared in Issue 22 of Blackbox Manifold. Among the Book of Songs’ entries on Dhū r-Rummah is an account of his mother visiting the market and catching sight of her son sitting on the ground, reciting poetry to a crowd of onlookers. Appalled or ashamed at his appearance (“short and ugly, pinched and hunched”), she cries out to his audience: “Listen to his poetry! Do not look at his face!” I am interested in what it means to read a poem—or translate one—whose authenticity and/or context is difficult to gauge, yet which derives its meaning (for the majority of its contemporary readers) through its place in an author’s biography and the place of that biography in tradition. These texts that are accessed through scholarship or the doors opened by scholarly traditions: what does it mean to read them as “whole”, cohesive (even coherent) poems in the present moment? Can translation offer a space in which these gravities are suspended, or held at bay; where uncertainty and ambiguity can hold out against the desire for resolution, to start and prolong stories rather than long for their end? There are three interpretative frameworks at work in the piece. The first is the traditional framing that locates the poem at the heart of an incident in which an-Nābighah is expelled or flees from the Lakhmid court of an-Nuʿmān. The second is the necessarily speculative scholarship that proposes it as an ekphrastic response to a Greek statue. The third is the translator’s reading, which holds both these historicizing narratives in uneasy suspension alongside the conceit of the text’s own poetic qualities and purposes: a poem unified by the theme of orifices (wells and springs and mouths, wet and cool), the metatheme of cords and rope and composition (conjured from the lines most commonly quoted as proof of an-Nābighah’s skill, the entries of the Lisān al-ʿArab, and the obsession with the poet’s supposedly characteristic tendency to “commit” iqwā’), and yet more