أبها الشعر

Notes

1. Abha is the capital of the ʿAsīr region, in the mountains of south-western Saudi Arabia, known for its heights, rains, gardens and mild summers. Its name sounds exactly like the Arabic abhā, ‘more (or most) resplendent, lovelier’, and the poet plays on this throughout; the collection itself is called Anti abhā, ‘You Are More Resplendent’. The Arabic title, Abhā al-shiʿr, can be heard both as ‘Abha of poetry’, the city that restored the poet to verse, and as ‘the loveliest of poetry’. ↩
2. Maliyyā, ‘for a long while’, recalls Qurʾan 19:46, where Abraham’s father tells him wa-hjurnī maliyyā, ‘forsake me for a long while’; the poet likewise ‘forsook’ (hajartu) poetry. The rhyme in -iyyā is that of the Sura of Mary, and other rhyme words here echo it too: bukratan wa-ʿashiyyā, ‘morning and evening’ (19:11), and najiyyā, ‘in intimate converse’ (19:52). ↩
3. The palm tree, feminine in Arabic, becomes a woman whose fronds are a braid of hair; the poet marks shaʿr, ‘hair’, with its vowel to set it apart from shiʿr, ‘poetry’, of the title, the two being spelled alike. The next verse completes the picture: the fronds drip golden ingots, the ripe date clusters, and the diminutive exclamation mā uḥaylā, ‘how sweet!’, adds endearment. The pronoun ‘they’ (literally ‘she’) is taken to be the palms; it can also be read as the daughter of Abha of verse 3: ‘Have you seen its palm trees? She is lovelier still, in a braid of her hair’, so that woman and palm merge. ↩
4. ʿAbqariyy, ‘of genius, marvellous’, comes from ʿAbqar, a legendary valley haunted by jinn, where anything of wondrous workmanship was supposed to be made. ↩
5. The picture is of a face veil that leaves only the eyes uncovered: all her beauty is hidden but her eyes, and these are the most dazzling part of it. ↩
6. Abhā, ‘lovelier’, and Abhā, the city, are identical in sound; in writing they differ only in the final letter (أبهى, أبها). The verse sets the two side by side, so that she outdoes both all beauty and the city whose very name means ‘lovelier’. The words can also be divided differently: ‘She is lovelier than every beauty; and Abha, when it adorns itself, is worthy of its fair women.’ ↩
7. Tastaḥiqqu al-ḥisān is read as ‘she deserves fine things’, ḥisān being taken as the fair adornments that suit her when she dresses. It can also mean that she deserves her place among the beautiful women, that is, that she outshines them. ↩
8. Abha is known for its summer festivals. Al-tharā, ‘the moist earth’, and al-thurayyā, ‘the Pleiades’, are nearly identical in sound and are proverbial together for the lowest and the highest: Abha’s earth, with its flowers, competes in beauty with the stars above it. ↩
9. Ḍilaʿ is a valley and mountain pass near Abha, down which torrents rush after heavy rain. ↩