The Life and Times of Abū Tammām survives in a unicum manuscript, Istanbul Fatih 3900 (housed in the Süleymaniye Library), dated paleographically to the sixth/twelfth century. The Istanbul manuscript is written in a beautiful rounded naskh hand and is carefully vocalized. Orthographic peculiarities are the vocalizing with full iʿrāb of all verse endings (even if not pronounced); the defective writing of alif in some common names and words; the addition of alif al-wiqāyah in singular verbs; the dotting of yāʾ in alif maqṣūrah when pronounced ā but not otherwise (in the alif mamdūdah the maddah stands for hamzah); and the expressing of hamzah written on the line as yāʾ.
The script is well balanced on the page, with overlong lines at times crossing beyond the text block. The rhyme words of the poems are stretched to the margin and vertically aligned. Accounts are marked off from each other by a dotted circle or hāʾ, and at times an account is separated from its commentary by a dotted circle as well. Occasional line spaces fall between groups of accounts, and the beginning of most chapters is indicated by a new page with the title written in a larger pen. Each page refreshes the eye in a glorious calligraphic marriage of art and meaning.
This manuscript has a remarkable editing history. Khalīl M. ʿAsākir and Muḥammad ʿA. ʿAzzām had been inspired by seminars on editing Arabic manuscripts (ʿilm naqd al-nuṣūṣ) by Paul Kraus and Gotthelf Bergsträsser at Cairo University in 1931–32,26 and aimed to put their newly acquired expertise into practice, exemplifying the best European standards, “as a service to Arabic language and culture.” They encountered the present work while collecting manuscripts and commentaries for an edition of Abū Tammām’s Dīwān27 and decided to publish it first, because it documented how the specific debate about Abū Tammām among the modern poets sparked the emergence of poetics as a discipline in the early Abbasid period.
During the editing process, they consulted leading scholars: Carl Brockelmann, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Aḥmad Amīn, Paul Kraus, and Ibrāhīm Muṣṭafā. Having nearly completed their edition, the two editors were made aware by Helmut Ritter of a doctoral dissertation on the same work by Naẓīr al-Islām al-Hindī in Breslau, Germany, under the direction of Otto Spies.28 The three scholars then communicated and combined their results in the present collective edition “in the most complete manner possible.” The edition was thus the result of a rare and felicitous union of East-West scholarly cooperation.
My inspection of the manuscript has resulted in only minor emendations to their edition in the preparation of this volume, most of which appear in the apparatus. The present edition is much indebted to their excellent work. Important aspects of the manuscript’s formatting, copyist’s corrections, and my emendations are footnoted. Not indicated by footnote are manuscript conventions, such as the omission of the lengthening alif in common names and the omission of alif or hamzah in frequent words and phrases.29 Variants of the cited poetry from poets’ collected works are indicated in the notes to the English translation.
The Istanbul manuscript is here abbreviated in the footnotes as ا, and the Beirut reprint of the Cairo edition from 1937 as ع. Emendations in the Beirut reprint attributed to an individual editor are ه for al-Hindī and عس for ʿAsākir.
The English translation is fairly free and idiomatic, supplemented by explanatory insertions implicit in the Arabic text but not obvious to the English reader. These are not signaled, as they are easily identifiable by comparison with the facing Arabic text. When the text uses a less recognizable form of an individual’s name, the more common name is also supplied for clarity. The phrase “Al-Ṣūlī:” introduces explanatory comments inserted by al-Ṣūlī. Citations of Abū Tammām’s poetry are identified in terms of their occurrence in the Diwān edited by ʿAzzām (4 vols., Cairo, 1951–65), and abbreviated as D in the endnotes to the translation. When poems are cited in abridged form this is indicated by an ellipsis at the end of the verse preceding an omission. They are also presented in the form of a concordance that covers the present volume, the poet’s Dīwān, and his al-Ḥamāsah and al-Waḥshiyyāt anthologies. Readers interested in the context of any given ode can thus easily find relevant accounts as far as these exist. Occasional (usually minor) variations in verses between The Life and Times of Abū Tammām and the Collected Poems are given in the endnotes, too, but are left unaltered in the accounts, as they were transmitted independently from the Collected Poems, and their differences attest to a different textual history.