1 - Pre-Islamic Bedouin Poetry

Summary

The Arabs possess a glorious treasure in the “Moallakat.”

EARLY IN THE SIXTH CENTURY, in the north of Arabia, a poetic tradition of unprecedented artistic perfection blossomed into a “fully developed literary art,” seemingly of its own accord and without antecedents. Poets suddenly appeared whose “qasidas,” as they called their odes, treated “a variety of themes with superb energy, lively wit, and precise images,” combining “a rich and highly developed language with the most sophisticated rhymes in complex metrical schemes.” There is widespread surprise that “a Bedouin people otherwise only moderately cultivated had created poetry of astonishing formal richness and of the greatest subtlety.” During the eighth century, anthologies of this pre-Islamic poetry were assembled. The so-called Moallakat is considered the oldest of these collections to have come down to us, and the one containing the best poetry. The word means “those that were hung up,” a title not yet satisfactorily explained. Experts no longer accept the idea that the poems had been judged the best in poetic contests, written down in golden letters and hung up at the Kaaba in Mecca. We can leave questions such as which qasidas actually are to be included in the Moallakat to specialists in Arabic literature. We wish primarily to determine with which poets Goethe was familiar and how they influenced him.

William Jones (1746–94), Goethe’s contemporary, played a leading role in making the Moallakat known in the West. In his famed Poeseos Asiaticae Commentarii libri sex of 1774, Jones presented the seven “golden odes” as the unexcelled initiation and culmination of Arabic literary art. Three years later, J. G. Eichhorn, the Jena theologian and Arabist, published a reprint and presented a copy to Goethe. In 1783, Jones’s transcription of the anthology appeared together with an English translation. This immediately moved Goethe to translate the Moallakat into German, as his letter to Carl von Knebel on 14 November 1783 confirms:

Jones, known for his study of Arabic poetry, has published the Moallakat or the seven odes by the seven great Arabic poets that hang in the mosque in Mecca with an English translation. As a whole, they are remarkable and contain delightful passages.