CBS/SONY COL 481 496 2
1993
قيس بن الملوّح
· مجنون ليلى
01 - QAYS (m. 668)
Fou de Layla (Mad for Laila) (5:49)
عمر الخیام
· يا حبيبي
02 - OMAR KHAYYAM (1048-1131)
Eau et Vent (Water and Wind) (5:47)
ابن عربي
· صار قلبي
03 - IBN ºARABI (1185-1240)
Croyance (Belief) (5:52)
طرفة بن العيد
· أرى العيش
04 - TARAFA (543-569)
Errance (Wandering) (7:13)
أدونيس
· الوقت
05 - ADONIS (n. 1930)
Le Temps (Time) (6:30)
المتنبي
· الحمّى
06 - AL-MUTANABBI (915-965)
La Fievre (Fever) (6:39)
أنسي الحاج
· سوف يكون
07 - UNSI AL HAJJ (n. 1937)
Adviendra (Come to Pass) (5:10)
أبو العلاء المعري
· القلب كالماء
08 - AL-MAºARRI (973-1059)
Pareil a l'Eau (Like Water) (5:44)
عبداللقدرالجزائري
· أنا فرد
09 - ABDELKADER AL DJAZAIRI (1803-1883)
Etre (Being) (6:48)
شاعر أندلسي مجهول
· صاحِ
10 - ANÓNIMO ANDALUSÍ (siglo XI)
Aveu (The Avowal) (7:17)
Abed Azrié, musique et chant
Imad Morcos, qanun
Sameh Catalan, violin
Muhammad Mutalattef, nay
Adel Shams, percussions (mazhars, riqq, darbukka)
Michèle Claude, percussions, marimba
Benoît Urbain, accordion, keyboards
enregistrement et mixage, Gerard Lhomme
Studio Chermeviéres - Mars 1993
assistant, Stéphane Bili
QAYS ( d. -668), called "Laila Mad
Lover".
One of the earliest precursors of 'court' love," Qays led a life that
exemplified the obsessions of this poetic genre. His childhood
declaration of love for Laila brought dishonor on their tribe.
Condemned to banishment and knowing Laila married to another, Qays
wandered half-naked through uninhabited regions up until his death. At
the height of Islamic dominance, the poet had abandoned rituals and
prayers to make of Laila his religion. This "mad love" was to become an
enduring model for Arabic, Persian and Turkish mystical literature,
just as it left its indelible stamp on Aragon's book-length poem Elsa's
Mad Lover.
OMAR KHAYYAM (1048-1131).
Mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet, Omar Khayyam was born
in Nishapur, Iran, a major city on the silk route to Asia. Four
centuries before Ronsard, this contemporary of Abelard shunned the
mainstream of ideas to insert himself into the parallel subversive
tradition of doubt "Say to the sages that, for lovers, ecstasy is the
only guide; thought can never point the way". Water and Wind" is a set
of excerpts from his famous Quatrains, better known as The Rubaiyat.
IBN ARABI (1185-1240).
Born in Murcia, Spain, this major theosophist of mystic Islam is said
to have written some 500 works, an
immense encyclopedia of Isksnric thought which
assimilates the philosophical and religious currents of the
period— Greek Persian, Hebraic and Christian — into an
entirely personal monotheism. For him, God can be found in all
religions, as in all things. After traveling throughout the
Mediterranean Basin and the Byzantine Empire, Ibn Arabi lived out his
days in Damascus.
TARAFA (543-569).
Author of one of the seven celebrated poems to have been painted in
gold and hung from the Black Stone of Mecca before the advent of Islam,
Tarafa was born into a Christian family in Bahrein. Thirteen centuries
before Rimbaud, this pagan rebel rejected the dominant morality of the
times for a life of bohemian pleasure and indifference. Victim of his
own excesses, he incurred the wrath of a local ruler: Tarafa, the
illiterate, oral poet, delivered his own death sentence, unable to
grasp its meaning. His execution at the age of 26 earned him the labels
"the poet at twenty," "the murdered youth".
ADONIS (1930).
Born in Syria, this tireless proponent of the revolution in Arabic
poetic language was a regular contributor to Shee'r (Poetry) during the
1960s and a founder of Mawakef (Positions), the avant-garde literary
reviews that spearheaded modern Arabic poetry. Besides his numerous
collections of poetry, Adonis is the author of critical essays, editor
of an anthology of classical Arabic poetry and the translator of such
French authors as Racine and Saint John Perse. He has lived in Paris
since 1985. "Time" was written in 1982, during the Israeli military
intervention in Beirut.
AL MUTANAB'BEE (915-965).
Born in Kufa, Iraq, the intrepid and indefatigable Al Mutanab'bee led a
life of unending peregrinations throughout the Middle East, where he
recited his poems to princes and kings, seated in their company and
often inclined to compare himself to them. Imprisoned in Syria for
claiming his works to be, like the Koran, a product of divine
revelation, he acquired his naine "Al Mutanab'bee," or "he who pretends
to prophecy." Ultimately undone by his own verbal temerity, he was
murdered in Shiraz by a band of criminals. His verbal magic, however
has never ceased to exert an influence on all currents in Arabic poetry.
UNSI AL HAJ (1937).
Born in Lebanon, Unsi AI Haj has maintained his reputation as the
single signiftcant Arabic Surrealist poet. The highly personal and
insolently modern style of his early poems represented an effort to rid
Arabic prosody of its classical ponderousness. Al Haj has since turned
the Surrealist page, however, to devote himself to a long meditation on
love in which the masculine and feminine genders join each other in
their shared genesis. Starting in the 1960s, many of his translations
of Western authors began to appear in the literary review Shee'r
(Poetry) and he has published an Arabic adaptation of The Song of
Solomon.
AL MA'ARRI (973-1059).
Born in Ma'arrat, near Aleppo, Syria, the celebrated "double prisoner"
(blind since early childhood and adherent of voluntary poverty) was
endowed with an extraordinary memory for verse. His reputation was
forged, however, by his incessant rebellion against political
authority, religious institutions and the hypocrisy of his
contemporaries Sometimes taken for a pious Moslem, sometirnes for a
sceptic or even a heretic, Al Ma'arri was to exert a notable influence
on Dante's "The Divine Comedy." His collection of poems "The Necessity
of the Unnecessary", charts the tragic dimension of human experience.
ABDELKADER AL DJAZAIRI (1807-1883).
Born in Al Gotna, Algeria, Al Djazairi fought for seventeen years in
the resistance to the French Army. After five years of imprisonment in
France, he settled in Damascus, where he was buried, according to his
instructions, next to the great Sufi poet, Ibn Arabi. His preference
for the essence of religion rather than its external signs made him a
proponent of rationality and modernization. A point of exchange between
East and West, his poetry affirms the unity of religons ad shows
Judaism, Christianity and Islam to possess the same spirituality, the
same message.
ANONYMOUS (Andalusian, c. 11th cent.).
The Arabic word muash'shah designates not only the traditional Spanish
woman's headdress (mantilla), embroidered with pearls and priceless
gems, but also a form of Arabo-andalusian poetry which developed in
Spain toward the end of the 11th century. In the same medieval period
that gave the West the poetic songs of the troubadours and of the
trouvères, a popular Arabic poetry surfaced on the lberian
peninsula which was simple, transparent, spontaneous and
refined.