742 “Kaʿb’s poem”: i.e., the ode by Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr (first/seventh century) in which he apologizes to the Prophet Muḥammad for having satirized Islam and which became “one of the most famous Arabic poems” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, 1:421).
743 qaṣīdah musammaṭah: a poem in which the two hemistichs of each line rhyme but each line has a different rhyme.
744 “fettered” (muqayyadah): i.e., the rhyming syllables should all end in a vowelless consonant.
745 “The pausal form is required” (al-ṣawābu l-wuqūfu ʿalā l-hāʾ): i.e., 
.
746 “Strangely contorted” (hiya mina l-tabaltuʿi bi-makān): apparently meaning that the writing of the kasrah and the ḍammah is superfluous.
747 “unless the pronominal suffix refers to something mentioned earlier” (illā idhā kāna l-ḍamīru yarjiʿu ilā madhkūrin qablahu): the hemistich in question runs ʿadhīrī mina l-ayyāmi maddat ṣurūfuhu but it is more natural to read ṣurūfuhā (“days whose vicissitudes have passed”) than “my advocate (ʿadhīrī) whose vicissitudes have passed.”
748 “are fond of foolishness” (yuḥibbūna l-ʿabath): the author exploits the meaning of the mistakenly written ʿābith.
749 “Will you not then understand?” (a-fa-lā tashʿurūn): reminiscent of Qurʾan law tashʿurūn (“if only you could understand”) (Q Shuʿarāʾ 26:113) and similar phrases.
750 “Should be 
as the poet was not being wordy” (al-ūlā bi-l-ḍammi fa-inna l-shāʿira ghayru mutanaṭṭiʿ): i.e., the poet says “and my life…” and is not using the oath la-ʿumrī, which might be considered unnecessary and thus “wordy.”
751 
: the author has misread de Sacy’s edition, which does in fact read 
.
752 “It would be better to stick with one or the other” (al-awlā l-iqtiṣāru ʿalā iḥdāhumā): de Sacy says in his commentary that durnā, with upright alif, is a noun of place (de Sacy, Maqāmāt, I:319 line 13), then quotes a verse in support of this in which he uses the same word with alif-in-the-form-of-yāʾ.
753 “Dhū l-Rummah was not one to use contorted language”: i.e., the meter requires a long syllable in this position, and the normally diptote form jalājila, ending in a short vowel, has to be read as triptote.
754 “a parallel form occurs in the first line” (wa-fī l-bayt al-awwal naẓar): the final word of the first hemistich of the first line of the probative verse quoted here is bi-qafratin, also with tanwīn, which should have alerted the editors.
755 “the word 
is twisted”: the reference is to the line above, where 
is an error for 
.
756 “line at the bottom of the page”: in fact, the line before the line at the bottom of the page.
757 “compare 
”: according to some lexicographers, this word is invariable (see Lane, Lexicon).
758 “the diminutive not being allowed to take the definite article”: the words al-basīṭah and busayṭah (diminutive of the former) both mean “the earth” but the latter is always without the definite article, being treated as a proper name.
759 “unwieldy wording” (al-tanaṭṭuʿ): de Sacy’s version of the second hemistich of the verse runs wa-bi-nafsī rtafaʿtu lā bi-judūdī; more authoritative versions have the shorter fakhartu for irtafaʿtu.
760 “the first tāʾ being dropped to make it lighter” (ḥudhifat al-tāʾu l-ūlā li-l-takhfīf): on omission of ta- from the imperfect of Form V and VI verbs, see Wright, Grammar, I:65B.
761 “
is with a, you professors!” (al-ʿamā bi-l-fatḥ yā asātīdh): also, punningly, “Damn that a, you professors!” from the Lebanese colloquial expression il-ʿama (“Damn!”).
762 “also 
not 
”: 
appears in the last line on p. 633.
763 “Corr.”: in the Arabic 
(ṣ) is used apparently as an abbreviation of 
(ṣawābuhu), meaning “the correct form being…”
764 “Qiṣṣat ʿAntar (The Story of ʿAntar)”: a popular romance relating a mythologized version of the life of the pre-Islamic poet ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād al-ʿAbsī; dating to the eleventh or twelth century AD, it employs a language with oral features and “drew the interest of nineteenth-century Orientalists, who saw ʿAntar as the paramount Bedouin hero” (Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia, I:93). Caussin de Perceval’s Notice et extrait du roman d’Antar was published at the Imprimerie Royale in Paris in 1833.
765 Conte Alix Desgranges: not “Desgrange” as in the Arabic.
766 The only other translation of which I am aware is René Khawam’s into French (Faris Chidyaq, La jambe sur la jambe). This does not, however, pretend to be complete, since the translator asserts, without offering evidence, that much of the Arabic text was originally written separately and included in al-Sāq simply to take advantage of the availability of funds for publication; the translator has omitted this extraneous material and thus, according to his claim, presents the book, for the first time, “dans toute son originalité” (Chidyaq, Jambe, 19). Khawam does not specify exactly what he has omitted, but examples include the “Memorandum from the Writer of These Characters” in its entirety (Volume One, 1.19.11–23) and, more surprising in its selectivity, many but not all items of certain lexical lists (e.g., forty-three items omitted out of an original fifty-six between Shi‛b Bawwān (Volume Two, 2.14.42) and bint ṭabaq (Volume Two, 2.14.46) in the list of things incapable of preventing a man from shrieking “I want a woman!”; see Chidyaq, Jambe, 311). Khawam also omits the Appendix (Volume Four, 5.3.1 to 5.3.12). The result is a radical shortening of the text that appears to run counter to the author’s wishes as expressed in the warning in the Proem (also omitted by Khawam), “Beware, though, lest you add to it or / Think of using it in abbreviated form, / For no place in it is susceptible / To abbreviation, or to addition, to make it better.” (Volume One, 0.4.12.).
767 Starkey, “Fact,” 32.
768 Cachia, “Development,” 68.
769 On saj‛ in general, see Meisami and Starkey, Encyclopedia; for a discussion of saj‛ in al-Sāq ‛alā l-Sāq, see Jubran, “Function.”
770 This loss of “linking and correspondence”—by which I take the author to mean strict parallelism — would probably have particularly upset him: in a eulogy of saj‛ written later he writes, “And what shall teach thee what is saj‛? Well-matched words to which man cleaves by disposition and to whose sound his heart must yield in passionate submission, so that they become impressed upon his memory, and how effective that impression—especially when adorned with some of those beauties of the elaborate rhetorical style that employ orthographic and morphological guile…. This is the miracle with which no non-Arab can vie or to whose peaks draw nigh!” (al-Shidyāq, Sirr, 3–4).