Early Arabic lyric casts a gauzy veil over and across French poetry. It informs and influences Franco-Arab poetic aesthetics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The continual persistence of its subsurface closeness to contemporary and modern forms foils a near-invisibility, undergirding poetic intimacies to a point of semblant sameness. The difference, much finer in reality, seems linguistic—French written over Arabic, writing French across Arabic. The repetition of difference transforms appearances, begetting questions of origin, chains of transmissions, the immutability of a singular, matricial ur-form. Is Arab lyric condemned to endless cycles of selfsame iterations, reproductions, calques? Is lyric a dress, exceeding its mode of address? A fabric that clothes and dresses, closes and disses the poem? Swollen full of the translanguage, the poem rips it up.

Origins

The earliest known Arabic texts date from the fifth century. The most famous among them, which form the locus of inquiry here, date from the sixth century. Contemporary scholars of Arabic such as A. J. Arberry and Alan Jones have alternatively referred to early Arabic lyric as ‘the first chapter in Arabic literature’ and to ‘a general appreciation among the classical Arab critics of the basic importance of poetry in early Arab tribal society’ (Jones, Early 1). Across the immense body of scholarship on classical Arabic literature, a general consensus prevails on the acoustic image of the earliest texts: their oral sonority, their psychic imprint, the impression traced over the imaginary of Arabic literary cultures, and, later, over the imaginary of the Franco-Arabic lyric and French poetry.

In his classic lectures on Arabic poetics, delivered at the Collège de France in May 1984, then published in 1985 as Introduction à la poetique arabe, Syrian poet and critic Adonis dedicates his opening reflections to the po étics of orality in jāhiliyya. Literally meaning ‘the age of ignorance,’ al-jāhiliyya refers to Arabia in the era prior to the advent of Islam in 610 ce, the year of the first Qurʾānic revelations by the archangel Gabriel to the prophet Mu ḥammad, and the hijra [emigration] of Mu ḥammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 ce.