1.5.2
Though here I would add that, when his excellence as a copyist became bruited abroad, a certain man whose name rhymes with Baʿīr Bayʿar148 summoned him to copy out the ledgers in which he would enter everything that had happened during his day. His purpose in doing so was not to benefit any scholar but derived from a simple desire to hold onto events lest they escape the orbit of the days or become detached from the chain of circumstance, for many believe that to summon up the past and make it a visible entity is in itself a great thing. This is why the Franks have been keen to record everything that happens in their lands; the exit of an old woman from her house in the morning and her return to it at ten o’clock, leading a dog of hers, with the wind blowing and the rain coming down hard, neither escapes their pens nor is foreign to their thoughts.
1.5.3
There is material of this sort in the introduction to the verse collection Méditations poétiques of Lamartine,149 the greatest French poet of our day, which I translate as follows: “The Arabs smoked tobacco in their long pipes in silence, watching the smoke rising like graceful blue columns until it dispersed into the air in a way beguiling to the observer, the air at the time being transparent, gentle.” Later he goes on: “Then my Arab companions put the barley in goat’s hair nosebags and placed these around the necks of the horses that were around my tent, their feet tethered to iron rings, and which stood motionless, their heads lowered to the ground and shaded by their heavy forelocks, their coats a glossy grey and smoking beneath the hot rays of the sun. The men, having gathered in the shade of an enormous olive tree, had spread out beneath them on the ground mats from Damascus, and set about talking and telling tales of the desert as they smoked their tobacco. They recited verses by ʿAntar, one of those Arab poets celebrated for their valor,150 husbandry”—by which he means, “animal husbandry”—“and eloquence, his verses having as much effect on them as the Persian tobacco in their nargilehs. When a verse cropped up that appealed particularly to their feelings, they would raise their hands to their ears, bow their heads, and cry out over and over again, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’”151 Later, describing a woman whom he saw weeping at the grave of her husband, he says, “Her hair hung down from her head, enveloped her, and brushed the ground. Her entire bosom was exposed, as is the custom among the women of this part of Arabia, and when she bent to kiss the carved turban that topped the gravestone or press her ear against it, her exposed breasts would touch the ground and press their shapes into the dust, as though they were molds” (end; p. 24). The rest of this introduction is of the same character, even though he calls it Poetry’s Destiny, meaning, “what God Almighty has ordained for poetry and poets.”152
1.5.4
Similarly, the Voyage en Amérique of Chateaubriand,153 also one of the greatest poets of his day, contains the following: “The residence of the president of the United States was a small house built in the English style, with neither a guard of soldiers round it nor servants inside. When I knocked on the door, a young girl opened to me, so I asked her if the general was at home. She replied that he was. I said I had a letter that I wanted to deliver to him, so she asked me my name, which she found hard to remember. Then she said, Walk in sir.” (He gives these words in English to show that he knows the language.) “Then she walked in front of me, down a long walkway like a corridor and took me into a private apartment and indicated to me that I should sit down there and wait,” etc. (p. 25). Elsewhere he writes that he saw an American Indian woman with a thin cow and said to her, bewailing its state, “Why is this cow so thin?” and the woman answered him, “She eats little,” and again he provides these words in English, to wit, She eats very little. In yet another place he writes that he observed fragments of clouds, some in the shape of animals and others in that of a mountain or a tree or similar things. Knowing this, you will appreciate that, in objecting to my talking of things that are of no interest to you but are to me, you are simply being stubborn.
1.5.5
These two great poets wrote what they did fearing the censure of none, and none of their race opposed them. Indeed, the acknowledgment of their worth and their reputations grew to such dimensions that Our Lord the Sultan, may God preserve his rule, awarded Lamartine vast estates in the area of Izmir, even though no one has ever heard of a Frankish king awarding an Arab, Persian, or Turkish poet a single field, sown or barren. As for the person-whose-name-rhymes-with-Baʿīr-Bayʿar imitating the Franks in his history when he was an Arab, both his parents were Arabs, and his paternal uncle and aunt were both Arabs — the reasons remain unclear to me to this day. Maybe I’ll find out after finishing this book and then, God willing, let the reader know. All I ask is that no reader stop reading just because he’s ignorant of the reasons behind this imitation, important as they may be.
1.5.6
Here now is an example of the sort of thing the Fāriyāq used to write concerning the legends of Baʿīr Bayʿar: “On this day, the eleventh of the month of March 1818, So-and-so, son of Mistress So-and-so daughter of Mistress So-and-so, cut the tail of his grey stallion, which had been so long it swept the ground. That very day, he mounted it and it threw him off.” If you ask, “Why does he give the man’s ancestry via the female line?” I reply, “Baʿīr Bayʿar was religious, godly, and pious, and it is more proper and precise to trace a man’s ancestry via his mother than his father, for there can be only one mother — which is not the case with the father — because the fetus has only one possible exit point.” Further: “Today a ship was seen on the sea, plowing along. It was thought to be a man-o’-war come from one of the ports of France to bring freedom to the people of the land. On investigation, however, it turned out to be just a rowing boat loaded with empty barrels coming to take water from the spring at such-and-such a place.” If it be said that this contradicts the normal state of affairs, for large things appear small at a distance and not the opposite, reply may be made that when a person gives himself over to his fancies, he sees things differently from how they really are. Thus, for example, someone in love with a short woman will fail to notice her shortness, and if someone finds himself alone with his beloved in a hunter’s hide, he’ll think it more spacious than the pavilion of Bilqīs;154 furthermore, a small light seen from a distance will appear to us as a large one. Small wonder, then, that a rowing boat should look like a man-o’-war or a frigate. The people there still dream that their heads have been crowned with the bonnets of the French and their honor welded to theirs, to the degree that they see their womenfolk to be like those described by the poet when he says: