Arabic Poetry Resources

 

Learning Arabic

Commercial sites for learning Arabic include: rosetta stone, babel, arabic2000, shariahprogram, al-bab egyptian arabic, mulilingual books arabic school, unrv and arabic school software.

Free information can be found on ukindia, hikyaku, learn arabic, hejleh, search language and academicinfo.

Online Arabic-English-Arabic dictionaries are at: websters, applied language, almisbar, yourdictionary, Arabic dictionaries and etcaco.

Some useful language exchanges: friends abroad, xlingo, mylanguage exchange, polyglot learn language, and lingozone.

Arabic Poetry

Arabic is very different from the Indo-European languages in its letter forms and structure. Its poetry is quantitative, and builds on rich oral traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia. General introductions can be found at cornell, britannica, simawe, encarta, Arabic poetry, wikipedia, muslim philosophy, new criterion and islamcity.

A very readable introduction is still R.A. Nicholson's A Literary History of the Arabs (CUP, 1956). More specialist is Julie Scott Meisami's Orient Pearls: Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).

Al Mutanabbi

The greatest of classical Arabic poets, Al-Mutanabbi (the prophet: 915-965) was also a political firebrand. The poet was the master of the exuberant panegyric, arousing the greatest enthusiasm in native speakers. His Diwan (collected poems) are famous for their long-lived qasida and madin. The classical period ended with the 1258 sack of Baghdad by the Mongols, but Al-Mutannabi has been an inspiration to poets trying to recapture an earlier vigour and purity.

Translations can be found at oldpoets, arberry google booksearch etc., and the original texts at cornell.

 

 

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