The lonely gazelle

Moorish tile with a gazelle in an Andalusian antique shop

“An anthology compiled from fragments of anthologies – that’s all we know from the poetry of al-Andalus”, writes Modest Solans Mur in his recently published volume, in which he collects the surviving Arabic poems of medieval Andalusia, and translates them in a beautiful style, addressed to the modern reader. The title of the volume, The Market Without Buyers comes from Abū Yaʿfar, who lived in 13th-century Ishbilia – today Seville –, whose ironic metaphor for poetry became a popular topos among Andalusian poets.

From the Andalusian Arab culture that flourished for eight hundred years, only fragments remain in present-day southern Spain, fragments of castles, palaces and mosques preserved by rebuilding, fragments of carvings and painted pottery, fragments of documents and poems, the remainders of a sunken Atlantis swinging on the surface of the sea. Even the most famous work, the impressive Alhambra Palace, is only a fragment of a former princely city. It is enough to let us sense the magnitude of this culture, but its details are no longer known to us.

And if we have so little left of the Arabic poetry of Andalusia, even less of the Jewish poetry in Judeo-Arabic that was born under Arabic influence in Cordoba in the 10th century, the largest Jewish city in the world at the time, which flourished in the Andalusian princely towns in the 11th and 12th centuries in the circles of poets such as Jehuda Halevi, Moses ibn Ezra or Salomon ibn Gabirol. This little was collected and translated by Peer Cole in his anthology The Dream of the Poem.

And if we know so little from Jewish poets, it is quite an exceptional coincidence that we are left with poems from a Jewish poetess as well. We know that women also wrote poems in Andalusia, and their contemporaries held these poems in high esteem, but we know only one medieval Jewish poetess, Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil – we know only her Arabic name, not the Jewish one – of whom only three poems survive. They were discovered by James Nichols in a 15th-century Arab poetic anthology by as-Suyūti from the Maghreb.

Qasmūna learned the craft from her father, Ismāʿil ibn Naghrilla, by his Jewish name Samuel ha-Nagid (993-1055), the grand vizier of the Zirid dynasty in Granada, and an acknowledged member of the Jewish poetry circle of Granada, which was presented by Ann Brener in her Judah Halevi and His Circle of Hebrew Poets in Granada. She also wrote her first surviving poem with her father. As narrated by as-Suyūti, Ismāʿil, in a playful spirit, usual among Arab poets, he recited two verses to his daughter, to be completed in the same rhythm and rhyme. The challenge was this:

Lī-ṣāḥibun dhū bahjatin qad qābalat nafʿan bi-ḍayrin wa-staḥallat jurmahā

A brilliant friend returned good with bad, considering his wickedness righteous.

To which Qasmūna promptly replied:

Ka-ššamsi min-ha-l-badru yaqbisu nūra-hu abadan wa-yaksifu baʿda ḍālika jirmahā

Just like the moon, which receives its light from the sun, but then it covers the sun with its body.

At which Ismāʿil – according to as-Suyūti, “as a madman” – jumped up, hugged his daughter, and said to her: “By the Ten Commandments, you are a greater poet than I!”

In addition to poetic greatness, a remarkable minor detail is that in 11th-century Andalusia, a woman was as aware of the nature of the eclipse, which was not so among of the erudite men in the Christian Europe of the period.

But Qasmūna’s talent, like that of other poets, was rooted in her solitude. This is what her other two surviving poems are about:

Ayā rawḍatan qad ḥāna min-ha qaṭāfu-ha wa-laisa yurā ḥānin yamudda la-ha yadā; fa-wā asafi yamdī-ššabābu muḍayyaʿan wa-yabqā-lladhī mā lanʿusammī-hi mufradā

Oh garden, the time of harvest has come but none stretches his hand to you. Alas! Youth passes and is wasted, and someone – I do not mention his name – remains alone.

In the Judeo-Arabic original, “someone” is masculine, which, according to Nichols, was a common form of hiding for a female author in Arabic poetry.

A knight chasing a gazelle in a flowery field, amidst the song of nightingales, a popular topos in Arabic love poetry. 14th-century fresco on the ceiling of the Alhambra’s royal banquet hall

And the third one, the most beautiful, most original and most touching, centered on a widespread topos in Arabic poetry, the gazelle symbolizing a beautiful woman. However, while male poets describe the gazelle from the outside, as the object of their desire, Qasmūna identifies with her, and shows how the gazelle sees herself.

Yā ẓabyatan tarʿa bi-rawdin dāʿiman innī ḥakaitu-ki fi-ttawaḥḥuši wa-l-ḥawari. Amsā kilā-nā mufradan ʿan ṣāḥibin fa-ʿitābu-nā abadan ʿalā ḥukmi-l-qadar.

Oh gazelle, always grazing here in this garden you are wild and bright black-eyed, like me and both of us lonely, forsaken: patiently bearing our fate’s decree.

Nasrid-era hand-painted, gilded vase from the Alhambra, with the gazelles chosen as the emblem of the palace