Long before modern literature explored the natural world, Arabic poets wrote verses about bees and honey collectors, the speed of birds, the gallop and gait of horses, and about other animals admired and hunted across the Arabian landscape.
According to German Arabist Stefan Weidner, the poems reveal a pre-Islamic Arabia more than 1,500 years ago where people keenly observed the world around them, with verse used as much to preserve knowledge and practical experience as for artistic expression.
“They must learn about nature in order to survive. If they don’t, they will be lost in this brutal desert landscape,” he tells The National. “They had a scientific mind that didn’t know about science, but they looked at their environment as thoroughly as scientists. Because they were unbelievers, they stuck to the environment and the real world, to what is here and now. And this made them discover it.”
Examples of these verses abound in Weidner’s Der Arabische Diwan: Die Schonsten Gedichte aus Vorislamischer Zeit (The Arab Diwan: The Most Beautiful Poems from the Pre-Islamic Era and Beyond), an anthology of about 1,000 verses that brings ancient Arabic poetry into contemporary German.
The book won this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Arab culture in other languages category, and will be highlighted as part of the Frankfurt International Book Fair next month.
The immediacy of the works, which date to the sixth and seventh centuries, is one reason they did not feel remote to Weidner when he began translating them.
Rather than replicate the Romantic, often archaic tone of earlier German translations, he wanted contemporary readers to experience the verses as directly as possible.
The move brought it more in line with the role poetry played in the region at the time, which he considers to have been closer to modern forms of communication.
“It’s a mixture of newspaper, social media, official communications in diplomacy, waging war and advertising,” he says. “People were advertising themselves or warning others about them. You will have works that state their strength. They would say things like: ‘I am the strongest. I have the best sword. I have a sword made in India, and Indian swords are supposed to be the best. And with that sword, you cannot attack me.’”
The collection also includes works by the sa'alik, or outcast poets, who used poetry to fashion an “almost outlaw” identity outside the protection of the tribe.
“Those are the guys who said: ‘I am very brutal and I can live by myself independently. I don’t need my tribe,’” he says. “And then you have the poet Imru’ Al Qais boasting about his adventures and the people he romantically pursued.”
Weidner says the collection also challenges any reading of pre-Islamic Arabia as culturally barren.
“They may not have been viewed as spiritually enlightened, but they were very educated as far as their surroundings were concerned,” he says. “They knew about the habits of the Romans and the Persians. So they had culture.”
The poems Weidner collected also preserve the violence of the period.
“They were all the time waging tribal wars against each other, and sometimes there was inner-tribal strife,” he says. “They were killing each other and spreading bad words about each other.”
For Weidner, those vivid passages of flowing blood, severed limbs and tribal warfare help explain his view of what Islam brought to the region: a sense of order through spiritual enlightenment.
“Islam brought peace through order and rules and peace of mind,” he says. “And this is why Islam really is a step forward.”
Weidner arrived at this body of poetry while researching the Mughal Empire and becoming interested in how Arabic literature entered European scholarship.
That inquiry eventually brought him to the German translations still available to contemporary readers, many of which were written in a 19th-century register that he felt was no longer suited to the poems.
“I thought we need to retranslate it for our times. We have to rediscover it for the contemporary German reader. And when I did a few, I was so surprised at how well it worked in German,” he says. “And I gave it to friends, and they said: ‘Wow, that’s really great. Do more of it.’”
The book was well received in Germany before winning the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. For Weidner, the recognition is significant because the exchange was never intended to move in only in one direction.
“It’s an appreciation from the Arab world, and it helps a lot because it says we have established a dialogue,” he says. “I don’t do it just for the Germans. It’s also something vice versa, and a reminder that even 1,500 years ago, this was a great culture in the Arab world.
“People still live with this culture. It’s still part of them; they still adore it and so on. It’s a living culture.”
