The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in The Classical Arabic Nasib by Jaroslav Stetkevych

by Jaroslav Stetkevych

Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, Jaroslav Stetkevych attempts in this book to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre.Stetkevych concentrates on the "places of lost bliss" that furnish the dominant motif in the lyric-elegiac opening section (nasib) of the classic Arab code, or qusidah. In defining the Arabic lyrical genre, he shows how pre-Islamic lamentations over abandoned campsites evolved, in Arabo-Islamic mystical poetry, into expressions of spiritual nostalgia. Stetkevych also draws intriguing parallels between the highlands of Najd in Arabic poetry and Arcadia in the European tradition. He concludes by exploring the degree to which the pastoral-paradisiacal archetype of the nasib pervades Arabic literary perception, from the pre-Islamic ode through the Thousand and One Nights and later texts.Enhanced by Stetkevych's sensitive translations of all the Arabic texts discussed, The Zephyrs of Najd brings the classical Arabic ode fully into the purview of contemporary literary and critical discourse.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published December 15, 1993

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best college course I ever took was a semester of classical Arabic poetry in which we were not allowed to speak English. Clumsily, we wandered through the jahiliyya poets and the first few generations of post-Islamic Arabic lyric masters. Bemused by images of camel eyes and lost campsites, gradually we came to understand the symbolic value of all these things, hardly meant to be read literally, but instead to know them as symbols used as invocations of emotions themselves.
Stetkevych's work focuses on the meaning of the structural symbolisms of qasidahs, especially the nasib and its eventual loss of its original Bedouinity when Islamic citied culture. He also traces the outgrowth of the ghazal from this rich well of lyrical idealism.
If none of the above means anything to you, pass over, glassy-eyed. For the one or two of you interested in this sort of thing, you've either already devoured this excellent book or are chastising yourself for not.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

For readers trapped inside English, Stetkevych is your man for all things qasidah, and The Zephyrs of Najd (the title alone carries some of his oddly lyrical flair) collects a career’s worth of reflections on Arabic poetry’s venerable formal backbone. Aside from the enlightening cross-cultural comparisons—Najd to Arcadia, qasidah to sonata, nasib to pastoral—Stetkevych throws open a window on how much innovation hides within a seemingly conservative poetic landscape. The Arabic poets who replicated the diction, themes, and even place names of pre-Islamic Bedouin verse long after it had ceased to apply to their own space and time did so because the “sequence of moods” at the center of the qasidah offered a flexible and highly economical means to concentrate personal experience. It’s Stetkevych’s sensitive notion of form—less a matter of meter or strictures than a variable structure of feeling—that extends the value of his analysis beyond classical Arabic poetry to offer a way of reading any formally regular verse where the fun lies in the poet’s cat-and-mouse game with the audience’s well-defined expectations. When every mention of the abode or the idyllic uplands of Najd evokes in the listener all the other poems containing abodes and Najds s/he’s sure to have heard, the poet becomes less an originator than a sophisticated manipulator of the subtle relations between text, context, and inter-textual allusion, which is where the real creative action of the qasidah takes place. In showing how these classical gestures operate, Stetkevych also opens a critical perspective on our own presumptions about modern poetry and what it should be or do. In the final footnote of the book, he writes:

“The theoretical relentlessness and immediacy of our modern understanding of all the formal and meaning-connotative aspects of artistic creation have undoubtedly contributed to our present aesthetic restlessness. The moment a form, subject, or symbol is used, it is also analytically understood in all its implications. Every repeated use of it then becomes a conscious imitation in depth. This we perceive as intolerable. At the most we cultivate it for a while only by attaching to it the suffix ‘ism’ and building around it a closed circle of aesthetically generic, broader tolerance. True originality, however, becomes possible only when the circle is broken. A new circle is then initiated, which hastens to close even faster, and so forth.”

[Ren · Rating 4 out of 5]

The information is doled out with a sometimes frustratingly spiral approach, but it is worth it. This book provides both a detailed look at the Nasib and a good look at the entire qasida content/form. How the ghazal grew from the nasib becomes clear.

This is a good book if you already have a fair grasp of the structure/content of the classic qasida.