Arapska Muzika

Abed Azrie
Lapis Lazuli


Tracks:
1. Mad For Laila (Qays)
2. Water And Wind (Omar Khayyam)
3. Belief (Ibn Arabi)
4. Wandering (Tarafa)
5. Time (Adonis)
6. Fever (Al Moutanabbi)
7. Come To Pass (Ounsi Al Haj)
8. Like Water (Al Ma'arri)
9. Being (Abdelkader Al DJazairi)
10. The Avowal (Anonyme Andalou)


1. MAD FOR LAILA
Laila's body dazzles
in her vestments,
A tree branch
wreathed with leaves.
By God, have you crushed Laila
in your arms at dawn,
or kissed her mouth?
Touch Laila and your hand
is wet with dew,
Green Leaves shoot through your fingerstips
To every I say she's close
At sunlight, reaching her as far.
They say I'm mad,
enamored of illusion,
By God, I swear,
no craze or spell excites me.
In Laila, love for Laila,
I've the cure, like a drinker
in drinking ever more.

QAYS (d.-668), called "Laila's Mad Lover". One of the earliest precursors of "courtly love," Qays led a life that exemplified the obsessions of this poetic genre. His childhood declaration of love for Laila brought dishonor on their tribe. Condemned to banishment and knowing Laila married to another, Qays wandered half-naked through uninhabited regions up until his death. At the height of Islamic dominance, the poet had abandoned rituals and prayers to make of Laila his religion. This "made love" was to become an enduring model for Arabic, Persian and Turkish mystical Literature, Just as it lift it's indelible stamps on Aragon's book-length poem Elsas Mad Lover.

2. WATER AND WIND
Love, what acts in my power,
what power in my acts?
For the Lord's pronouncement
Regulates the universe.

All my life, like
Rivulets in rivers was I,
Like wind winding
Through a wilderness

So let vine leaves
Weave my shroud
And clusters on the vine
Design my final resting place.

Make the juice of the fruit
The source of my ablution,
Smoth wine that's young and light,
Pure, intoxicating, marvelous.

OMAR KHAYYAM (1048-1131). Mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet, Omar Khayyam was born in Nishapour, Iran, a major city on the silk route to Asia. Four centuries before Ronsard, this contemporary of Abelard shunned the mainstream of ideas to insert himself into the parallel, subversive tradition of doubt: "Say to the sages that, for lovers, ecstasy is the only guide; though can never point the way." "Water and Wind" is a set of excepts from his famous Quatrains, better known as the Rubaiyat.

3. BELIEF
Protean, my heart henceforth
Assumes all forms: at once,
Meadow of gazelles * and cloister
Of the Christian monk, temple
Of idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba,
The TorahTablets tantamount
To the holy Koran's leaves.

Religion of love, my allegiance,
Wherever its caravans may lead.
For love is my only religion,Just as love is my final faith.

IBN ARABI (11885-1240). Born in Murcia, Spain, this major theosphist of mystic Islam is said to have writtsome 500 works, an immense encyclopedia of Islamic though which assimilates the philosophical and religious currents of the period --Greek, Persian, Hebraic and Christian -- into an entirely personal monotheism. For him, God can be found in all religions, as in all things. After traveling throughout the mediterranean basin and the Byzantine Empire, Ibn Arabi lived out his days in Damascus.
*gazelle: often employed designate woman.

4-WANDERING
In life I see a treasure
Dilapidated with each night.
Days escape this ruination
Only time is undermined.

Such days shatter all deception.
The man denied a crust of bread,
A shirt to clothe, a time to meet,
Will prove himself a harbinger.

I rise for combat or for pleasure.
Can your opprobrium immortalize?
In your impotence
to stay my death,
Let me contemplate it
with my means.

Never will I cease to drink
and savor pleasure,
in a reckless squandering
Of proprety and heritage.

TARAFA (543-569). Author of one of the seven celebrated poems reputed to have been painted in gold and hung from the Black Stone of Mecca before the advent of Islam, Tarafa was born into a Christian family in Bahrein. Thirteen centuries before Rimbaud, this pagan rebel rejected the dominant morality of the times for a life of bohemian pleasure and indifference . Victim of his own excesses, he incurred the wrath of a local ruler. Tarafa, the illiterate, oral poet, delivered his own death sentence, unable to grasp its meaning. His execution at the age of 26 earned him the labels "the poet at twenty," "the murdered youth"

5-TIME
I clasp the stem of time,
My head a fiery tower.
What, then, is this blood
Ever rooted in the sand?
What, then, this decline?
Flaming instants nullify our words.

My soul's forgotten its passion's purpose, forgotten its heritage,
Hidden in a house of forms,
Forgotten what the rain recounts,
What the tree's ink inscribes.

What cleaves me from myself?
Might I be more than one?
My history, my ruination?
My Promised land, my pyre?
Might I be several,
Each interrogating the other?
Who are you and where from?
If this be madness,
then let madness be my guide.

ADONIS (1930). Born in Syria, this tireless proponent of the revolution in Arabic poetic language was a regular contributor to Shee'r (Poetry) during the 1960s and a founder of Mawakef (Positions), the avant-garde literary reviews that spearheaded modern Arabic poetry. Besides his numerous collections of poetry, Adonis is the author of critical essays, editor of an anthology of classical Arabic poetry and the translator of such French authors as Racine and Saint John Perse. He has lived in Paris since 1985. "Time" was written in 1982, during, the Israeli military intervention in Beirut.

6.FEVER
My visitor,
with seeming diffidence,
withhholds her visitations
until dark.
She scorns a gift of mattresses
and gowns
To make a racking bed inside my bones.
Repudiated by the light, she weeps
Great tears that replicate her eyes.
I bathe in the cascade of that gaze.

A fearful pang like love anticipates
This apparition,
emptied of its ardor.
Twist of fate
In my own tortuous course,
How did you navigate
within this labyrinth?
You bleed a man
so cloaked in wounds
No flesh remains
for blades or arrows.

AL-MUTANABBEE (915-965). Born in Kufa, Iraq, the interepid and indefatigable Al-Mutanab'bee led a life of undending peregrinations throughout the Middle East, where he recited his poems to princes and kings, seated in their company and often inclined to compare himself to them. Imprisoned in Syria for claiming his works to be, like the Koran, a product of divine revelation, he acquired his name "Al Mutanab'bee," or "he who pretends to prophecy." Ultimately undone by his own verbal temerity, he was murdered in Shiraz by a band of criminals. His verbal magic, however, has never ceased to exert an influence on all currents in Arabic Poetry.

7. COME TO PASS
What must will come to pass.
There, will our love take place.

beautiful, she came to me, where
I don't know, came toward me,
beautiful as a forbidden thing

Carry me into all tongues
So my love may hear me,
See me as I am, both
The Old and the New.

I am a population of lovers.
Lend me your lives so that
I may await her, love her,
Find her, now and forever.

UNSI AL HAJ (1937). Born in Lebanon, Unsi Al haj has maintained his reputation as the single significant Arabic Surrealist poet. The highly personal and insolently modern style of his early poems represented an effort to rid Arabic prosody of its classical ponderousness. Al Haj has since turned the surrealist page, however, to devote himself to a long meditation on love in which the masculine and feminine genders join each other in their Shared genesis. Starting in the 1960s, many of his translations of Western authors began to appear in the Literary review Shee'r (Poetry) and he has puplished an Arabic adaptation of the Song of Solomon.

8-LIKE WATER
The heart is like water.
Passions agitate its surface, Rippling water in waiter.
Creature-like, an utterance
Commingles both the good and bad.
Like time, human beings body forth
As much of darkness as of light.

Just as day illuminates
Before the night,
so an extinguished star begets
Another's brilliance.

Similar to our vanished forebeats,
So we, similarly, must disappear.
Time alone
ensure its own endurance,
As plainly as you can plainly see.

Stranger in their native land are
Ardent practitoners of good,
Whose intimates sever ties and turn
Frequentation to a widening gulf.

Remember, should you have sealed
Friendship in the throes of poverty,
Should Properity arrive,remember.

AL MA'ARRI (973-1059). Born in Ma'arrat, near Aleppo, Syria, the celebrated "double prisoner" (blind since earlychildhood and adherent of voluntary poverty) was endowed with an extraordinary memory for verse. His reputation was forged, however, by his incessant rebellion against political authority, religious institutions and the hypocrisy of his contermporaries. Sometimes taken for a pious Moslem, Sometimes for a sceptic or even a heretic, Al Ma'arri was exert a notable influence on Dante's "The Divine Comedy." His collection of poems " The necessity of the Unnecessary", charts the tragic dimension of human experience.

9- BEING
I am God, I am Creature
I am Lord and Servant.

I am Throne and Trodden Path,
Both Hell and Paradise.

I am Water, I am Fire,
Air and naked Earth.

I am quantity and Quality,
What is lost, what is found.

I am Essence, I am Appearance,
Both the Near and the Far.

All dualities are mine:
I am Human, I am Divine.

ABDEL KADER AL DJAZAIRI (1807-1883). Born in Al Gotna, Algeria, Al Djazairi fought for seventeen years in the resistance to the french Army. After five years of imprisonment in France, he settled in Damascus, where he was buried, according to his instructions, next to the great Sufi poet, Ibn Arabi. His preference for the essence of relgion rather than its external signs made him a proponent of rationality and modernization. A point of exchange between East and West, his poetry affirms the unity of religions and shows Judaism, Christianity and Islam to possess the same spirituality, the same message.

10. The Avowal
Temperate companion, what man can ease the agony of love?
Does a confidant exist to hear The melancholy in the plaint
Weighing on my heart?

Consumed was I by suffering love,when
Longing at long last escaped my lips,
Confession coaxed by hopelessness
Wine served by a a servants hand
fedIntoxication, fueled an inner fire,
Ending in an ineluctable avowal.

Only the purest wines can wrench
Such disclosures from the heart.
Drink on, then, to the one I love,
She, my consummate contentment.

ANONYMOUS ( Andalusian, c. 11 th cent,). The Arabic word muash'shah designates not only the traditional Spanish woman's headdress (mantilla), embroidred with pearls and priceless gems, but also a form of Arabo- andalusian poetry which developed in Spain toward the end of the 11th century. In the same medival period that gave the West the poetic songs of the troubadours and of the trouveres, a popular Arabic poetry surfaced on the Iberian peninsula which was simple, transparent, spontaneous and refined.

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