Andalusian Poems

by Christopher Middleton (Editor), Leticia Garza-Falcon (Editor)

This stunning collection of poems opens up an entire world: the rich, virile, and highly literate Moslem culture of medieval Spain. This pioneering volume spans the full range of poetic emotion and enterprise, making this lost world of a millennium ago marvellously tangible, vivid and palpable. It pays special attention to the female poets, and to the evolution and meaning of the verse structures and songforms. This is a work of scholarly importance as well as a straightforward poetic pleasure.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, and then taught at the University of Zurich, at King's College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Holderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. Over the last two decades Carcanet has published six books of his poems, Intimate Chronicles (1996), one book of his experimental prose and two volumes of essays, as well as his Selected Writings and Faint Harps and Silver Voices, a collection of verse translations.

He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.

Reviews

[T. Frohock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a dry academic translation of the Arabic poems into English. Instead, Middleton and Garza-Falcon used Emilio Garcia Gomez's classic Spanish translations of the Arabic to compile this brief but beautiful collection. There are some differences between the Spanish and English translations, which Middleton and Garza-Falcon address in their introduction, where they explain precisely how they arrived at the wording.

A brief sample of their skills are on display in the poem WITH A KNIFE:

WITH A KNIFE

Is there no way I might
Open my heart with a knife
I could slip you in
And close the cut again

Till the end of time
Till the resurrection
You'd be inside
No heart but mine

In the webbing of my heart
You'd live my lifetime
In the tomb's twilight
You'd die when I did

Ibn Hazm
(Cordova, 994-1063)

The book is currently out of print; however, it is worth reading, especially if you want to see the poetry that influenced the poets and authors of Spain's Generation of '27 (Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, Manuel Altolaguirre and Emilio Prados).

[Katio Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Appreciated the annotations that aided in understanding, providing information to give background on the context and historical climate of the time.