Jr is with keen anticipation that the reader will turn

to this translation of the Mu'allakkt (we adhere to the customary transliteration), the first attempt, as Mr. Blunt justly claims, to render all the seven poems in vigorous English verne. Lady Anne Blunt's scholarship, combined with Mr. Blunt's poetic gifts, promise a work of great merit, nor is the promise un-

fulfilled. We have here the first worthy version of the poems as a whole. The task to which the translators set themselves

is one of enormous difficulty. The seven odes, the greatest

legacy of pre-Mahommedan, the greatest perhaps of all purely Arabic, cultivation, are instinct with a vitality remote from European experience. The life which they depict is strange to Us; the images which form a succession of vivid pictures to the Arab eye are so unfamiliar that they frequently require a lengthy explanation ; the very spirit of the poems differs from that which we have been taught to consider admirable. Here is no seeking after wisdom, nor for the place of under- standing; no searchings of the spirit, nor inquiry into the ultimate purposes of existence ; but the frank, the mag- nificent, acceptance of the good things of a life passed between bare earth and blazing heaven, of the joys of love and battle, and of the prowess of the singer. More- over, the poems date from fourteen hundred years ago ; they were composed in the century before the Hejra, and it seems probable that they were not written down until a sub- sequent age. The text is often obscure, sometimes corrupt; the later commentators had lost touch with the life repre- sented; the phraseology of the desert, then as now, was unfamiliar to the dwellers in towns ; many of the words had fallen out of use, and the incidents recorded in the odes were forgotten. The great compilations of the scholars of Baghdad have preserved for us fragments of the literature and the history of the Age of Ignorance—it is from these sources that the spirited stories which the translators prefix to each of the poems are drawn—but complete elucidation is not to be hoped for. In spite of these drawbacks, the odes are more widely known in every corner of the Arabic- speaking world than any other relic of the literature of the past, with the exception of the Koran. Mr. Blunt has men- tioned the Arab custom of carrying into battle a girl mounted on a camel, who incites the warriors of her tribe to valour by chanting a verse from a famous war-song. In one of the recent battles in Morocco the rebels were urged forward by a couplet from the Mu'allaka of 'Antara (we borrow Mr. Blunt's words) :— " Ask of the horsemen of Mklek, 0 thou his progeny, all they have seen of my high deeds. Then shalt thou learn of them—" Mr. and Lady Anne Blunt have brought to their task an intimate acquaintance with the life of the desert, so little different now from what it was in the century before the Prophet, and an invaluable knowledge of the geography of parts of Central Arabia.

The form of each of the seven poems is more or less the same. The singer begins with a short passage in which he "remembers love," to use the phrase of 'Amru 'bnu Kulthitm, and laments the days that are no more. Then he turns with a brisk transition to sterner things. "Man have done. For- get her," says Lebid. "Here on my swift-foot camel I laugh at love's bitterness," cries Trirafa (the words are taken from Mr. Blunt's version); and there follows a description of the desert and the desert life, of man and beast, conveyed in a series of brilliant images, unsurpassed, we make bold to say, in the poetry of any language. The whole ends with a battle- song, in which the valour of the poet and of his tribe are set forth. Thus the singer strikes in turn every note in the gamut of his experience.

For wild and pathetic beauty the first lines of the ode of Imru '1 Kais are perhaps the best example of the classic open- ing. The first couplet was imitated by Tennyson in " Lockaley Hall": "Stay, let us weep, remembering the Beloved and her dwelling-place." Mr. Blunt observes, in a note to a later verse, a resemblance between the Arab poet's description of the Pleiades and Tennyson's well-known couplet. The resem- blance was not fortuitous; this verse also was borrowed from

• The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia, known also as the Moallakat. Trans- lated from the Original Arabic by Lady Anne Blunt. 'Done into English Verse by Wilfred Scawen Blunt. London Published by the Translators ; Printed and Sold by the Chiswick Press. Ps. net.] a translation by Sir Charles Lys.11.* We cannot refrain from quoting from the same ode the marvellous lines to Night and to the Wolf that howls by night in the empty desert :— " Dim the drear night broodeth,—veil upon veil let down,

dark as a mad sea raging, tempting the heart of me.

Spake I to Night stoutly, while he, a slow camel, dragged with his hind feet halting,—gone the fore-hand of him.

Night ! I cried, thou snail Night, when wilt thou turn to day ?

when? Though in Booth day's dawning worse were than thou to me.

Sluggard Night, what stays thee? Chained hang the stars of thee fast to the rocks with hempen ropes set nn-moveable.

Water-skins of some folk—ay, with the thong of them laid on my naga's wither—borne have I joyfully, Crossed how lone the rain-ways, bare as an ass-belly ; near me the wolf, starved gamester, howled to his progeny.

Cried I: Wolf, thou wailest. Surely these lives of ours, thine and my own, go empty, robbed of prosperity. All we won we leave here. Whoa° shall follow us, seed in our corn-track casting, reap shall he barrenness."

It is scarcely necessary to point out how skilful is the mechanism of Mr. Blunt's verse. He uses assonance and

alliteration to imitate the ring of the Arabic, in which different forms of the same root, or different grammatical inflections of the same word, clash together in the mighty roll of the line. It would be impossible to handle English with greater mastery, yet the Arabic scholar will be forced to admit that it is equally impossible to reproduce such

a. line as 'Amru 'bun Kulthitm's " Mukaddaratan link wa mukaddarina."

In some respects the most successful of all the translations is that of 'Antara. His ode contains the beautiful lines concerning his wounded horse, which Mr. Blunt has trans- lated very felicitously :—

" Doggedly strove we and rode we. Ha! the brave stallion ! now is his breast dyed with blood drops, his star front with fear of them !

Swerved he as pierced by the spear-points. Then in his beautiful eyes stood the tears of appealing, words inarticulate.

If he had learned our man's language, then had he called to me : if he had known our tongue's secret, then had he cried to me."

There is, moreover, a passage unmatched by any in the Mu'allakitt, where the poet, like him of the "Song of Songs," compares his love to "a garden enclosed." The translation is of singular beauty :— " So is a garden new planted fresh in its greenery,

watered by soft-falling rain-drops, treadless, untenanted.

Lo, on it rain-drops have lighted, soft showers, no hail in them, • leaving each furrow a lakelet bright as a silverling.

• Pattering, plashing they fell there, rains at the sun-setting, wide-spreading runlets of water, streams of fertility, Mixed with the humming of bees' wings droning the daylight long, never a pause in their chaunting, gay drinking-choruses. Blithe iteration of bees' wings, wings struck in harmony, sharply as steel on the flint-stone, light-handed smithy strokes."

The last couplet quoted bears, it must be observed, no resemblance to the Arabic. Mr. Blunt in his preface dis- claims the intention of presenting us with a literal translation ; it would be ungrateful to quarrel with one who has given so much because he has not given more. The scholar will go to Sir Charles Lyall or to Noldecke, but he will nevertheless find it hard to forgive the many violations of the text in the present translation. In the passage above quoted Mr. Blunt has missed the sense of a beautiful and delicate image ; if he had turned to Noldecke, he would have found the explanation of the difficult line, but he does not seem to have consulted that great authority. Again, in the poem of 'Amru 'bun Kulthitm the reader looks expectantly to the lines in which the folds of the shirts of mail are compared to the back of a pool, "which the wind ripples as it passes," a couplet dear to all lovers of the Mu'allakat, only to find the passage disfigured

by a misrepresentation of the text. No one, not even so good a poet as Mr. Blunt, can play with the Arabic in this manner without paying the inevitable penalty in loss of quality. It is

interesting to note that Noldecke, guided chiefly by internal evidence, does not credit the tradition that Al Harith's ode was an answer to 'Amru 'butt Kulthilm. His opinion cannot be neglected.

The philosophy of the desert is to be found in the ode of the

• See Sir Alfred Lyall's Tennyson. wild youth Thrafa, and in that of Znhair, the old man full of wise saws. It amounts to little more than defiance or a weary submission, according to the years of the singer. "Nay, by thy life, I fear not," says Tirafa,—

" I hold not time weariness ;

neither hath day distressed me, nor night what it brought to me.

The days to come, what are they? A handful, a borrowing : vain is the thing thou fearest. To-day is the life of thee."

The wisdom of the old man lies at the opposite end of experience :— "I am weary of life who bear its burdens fourscore and how many years of glory and grief counted. Well may he weary be.

I know to-day and the day before it ay, and the days that were, yet of to-morrow I know nothing. Blind are the eyes of me. I have seen Fate strike out in the darkness, strike like a blind camel : some it touched died straight, some lingered on to decrepi- tude."

A word as to metre. Mr. Blunt has been particularly happy in his imitation of the Taw% the long measure used by Imrtt '1 Kais, Thrafa, and Zuhair. The even swing of the Kkmil, the Perfect metre, used by Lebid and 'Antara, is more difficult to render in our unaccentuated tongue, and Lebid's ode is perhaps the least satisfactory of any. Of the two shorter metres, Al Harith's is the better represented, is, indeed, excellently represented. It would be close upon an imperti- nence to insist upon the admirable freedom with which Mr. Blunt handles these unaccustomed forms: he almost persuades the ear that they are familiar.