1. Mirbad was a market and famous meeting place for poets outside Basra; Qatrabbul was a village near Baghdad renowned for its viticulture and taverns; al-Karkh was the suburb to the south west of Baghdad celebrated for its commerce – it is here that Abu Nuwas appears to have lived.
2. There is enough cumulative evidence that Abu Nuwas composed his poems on paper, taking care and time in the process. This renders problematic the issue of whether he was able to extemporize as well; a fair number of anecdotes would suggest that he could, but in most cases the poetry that is produced is short or somewhat occasional in nature.
3. In popular stories Abu Nuwas came to be seen as having something of a sixth sense, a quality originally implicit in the Arabic term for poet, sha‘ir.
4. The tahlil is the Arabic credo, “There is no god other than God.”
5. Among the motifs rendered bland with repetition is that of the beloved as the full or crescent moon and the sun. But these belong to a poetic code; Abu Nuwas’s originality within this repertoire could be surreal, at once intense and amusing: “My friend, I saw the sun walking about on Friday night // People stirred in wave after wave thinking this marked the Apocalypse; // For the sun to be seen at night! – and they all collapsed to the ground in terror ....”
6. These are playful, at worst mischievous poems and are not evil in the way the word “satanic” might suggest. The mystics of Islam often treated the Devil with some sympathy, according to their system of thought – most famously al-Hallaj (d. 922).
7. The waw in Arabic is also long “u”, depending on surrounding vocalic morphology.
8. i.e., it was not captured in the wild which would have required it to be hooded when kept domestically
9. i.e. close to exiting the body through the mouth
10. A proverbial saying, alluding to the fact that camels urinate backwards
11. ... In a note Vincent Monteil wrote (Abu Nuwas, 1979, p. 186) “This poem shows that he had only a vague idea about this dualist religion. ... The Manicheans held Jesus in very high esteem. The mistake made by Abu Nuwas here stems no doubt from a confused notion held by some who thought that ‘Jesus, crucified by the Jews, became the Devil in reality.’”
12. Aban’s contempt for divine anthropomorphism, in the image evoked of Moses speaking to God, is undermined by the glaring solecism in “ears” which is in the Arabic nominative case when, according to the grammatical construction used, it should be in the genitive.
13. The medieval editor glosses this line in more detail even than other lines: “He wipes out the traces, i.e., he is saying that this dog pares the earth while running, his belly wiping out the traces of his fore- and hind legs, thus his paw prints end up looking like the tracks of a drunkard who has dragged his clothes along the ground effacing them...”
14. ? – The text is uncertain here
15. There are earlier and later examples in Abu al-Najm al-‘Ijli and Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, respectively.