A STYLISTIC ASSESSMENT of ABU-Tammamrs POETRY a Thesis
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
A STYLISTIC ASSESSMENT OF ABU-TAMMAMr S POETRY A thesis submitted to the University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics by Muhammad Lutfi ZLITNI Department of Phonetics and Linguistics School of Oriental and African Studies October 1978 ProQuest Number: 10731358 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10731358 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 ii. To my father, my mother and the beloved ... iii . ABSTRACT The main object of this thesis is to assess the various techniques of poetic language in Classical Arabic as they appear in a particular corpus: the work of Abu: Tamma:m. After a general introduction which is meant to put the poet and his production in the right historical and socio-cultural context, different aspects of his con servatism are dealt with (e.g. poetic register, archaism, dialectism), before introducing the concept of 'fore grounding1 which will provide the rest of the analysis with its theoretical framework. According to this principle, a work of art in general is marked by its deviation from norms. Such deviation is behind the element of interest and surprise which gives significance and value to a piece of art. In Abu: Tamma:m's poetry, the foregrounded feature occurs in the form of parallelism or a deviation, and in both cases, it is picked out by the reader who will interpret it in relation to the background of the expected linguistic pat tern. In the analysis,particular interest is concentrated on phenomena at various linguistic levels. In this way, parallelism in Abu: Tamma:m's poetry Is found to occur mainly on the formal level (i.e. grammatical, phonological, metrical), while deviation is of interest primarily when it occurs on the semantic level. Each level is dealt with separately in different chapters. Thus, chapter three is concerned with grammatical parallelism and its two facets in Abu: Tamma:m's poetry: the syntactic and. the lexical-semantic. Both are dealt with successively in relation to the structure of the single verse of Classical Arabic which is found to be the basic foundation of this type of parallelism. In chapter four, phonological parallelism is dealt with and such devices as alliteration, internal rhyme, and morpho-phonological correspondence are analysed in detail, after an attempt to assess the way they have been approached by the Arab scholars. Their contribution to the musicality of a piece of poetry as well as their expres sive power are illustrated with examples from Abu: Tamma.:..mt s production. Metre, as an instance of foregrounded parallelism, is then looked into In chapter five. Here, the foundations of Arabic metres are first discussed before dealing with the distribution of metres in Abu: Tamma:m's work. Then, the interaction of metre and 'prose rhythm' in his pro duction is assessed, followed by a discussion of rhyme and its cohesive function. Finally, semantic deviation is analysed, and such features as semantic 'absurdity' and 'redundancy' in Abu: Tamma:m's language are briefly dealt with, before looking into the figurative devices most typical of his style. Particular interest is concentrated on metaphor for its central position in his work, and reference is made at various occasions to the attitude of the Arab scholars towards his own use of figurative devices. V. CONTENTS Page Abstract iii Contents v Transliteration ix Notes on translation xi Acknowledgements xiii Chapter One: General Introduction 1 I The birth of Arabic philology. 5 II. The Abbasid cultural expansion. 9 'III. Classical Arabic Poetry under the patronage of the philological schools 16 IV. Abu: Tamma:m: a distinguished name in Classical Arabic poetry 26 Chapter Two: Conformity and Innovation in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry 33 I. The trend of conformity in Abu: Tamma:m1s poetry. 33 1. Abu: Tamma:m and the Classical register. 33 2. ’Determination1 and the poetic register in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry. 52 3. Archaism in Abu: Tamma:m1s poetry. 55 4. Dialectism in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry. 81 II. Abu: Tamma:m and the creative use of language: the concept of foregrounding. 88 1. Abu: Tamma:1 , classicism and poetic creation. 88 vi. Page 2. ’Deviation’ and the concept of ■ foregrounding. 92 3. Another type of foregrounding: Parallelism. 97 4. Foregrounding and interpretation. 101 Conclusion. 105 Chapter Three: Grammatical parallelism in A.T.’s poetry 108 I. The structure of the single verse in Classical Arabic poetry. 109 II. Syntactic parallelism in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry. 120 1. Parallelism as a device of foregrounding 120 2. Syntactic parallelism and pure verbal repetition. 122 3. Degrees of syntactic parallelism. 123 4. Some stylistic implications of syntactic parallelism. 140 III. Semantic parallelism in --------Abu: Tamma:m'sj----- poetry. 147 1. The thematic organization of the verse in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry. 148 2. The major types of semantic parallelism in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry. 152 A. Parallelism of synonymy. 154 B. Parallelism of opposition or ’antithesis’. 162 vii. Page Chapter Four: Phonological parallelism in Abu: Tamma: 111*8 Poetry 171 Introduction 171 I. The meaning of phonological parallelism. 177 II. The Arab rhetoricians and phonological schemes in Abu: Tamma:m*s poetry. 180 1. Alliteration (or Jina:s). 183 2. ’Fronting1 (or tasdi:r). 185 3. 'Balancing' (or muwa:zanafov). 188 III. Musicality and phonological schemes in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry. 194 1. Is metre the only element that relates poetry to music? 194 * 1 2. The major types of phonological schemes in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry. 204 A. Alliteration. 205 B. Internal rhyme. 207 C. Correspondence of phonological and/ or morpho-phonological structures. 209 3. The overlap of phonological schemes. 214 IV. The textual interpretation of sound patterns in Abu: Tamma:m’s poetry. 223 Conclusion. 24l Chapter Five: Metre in Abu: Tamma:m's Poetry. 243 I. Introduction: On the foundations of Arabic metre. 243 1. The basic metrical components of Arabic. 243 Vlll . Page 2. The sixteen metres of Classical Arabic poetry. 248 3. Arabic metres: an instance of syllabic-durational metres. 253 4. Rhythmical stress and Arabic metres. 257 II. The distribution of metres in Abu: Tamma:m Ts poetry. 266 III. The interaction of Tprose rhythm’ and verse form in Abu: Tamma:m's poetry. 276 IY. Rhyme: an instrument of phono-semantic cohesion in Abu: Tamma:m's poetry. 297 1 . The rhythmical function of rhyme in the two-hemistich form. 297 2. The constraining effect of monorhyme. 304 3# The function of rhyme in verse, structure. 311 Chapter Six: Deviation in Abu: Tamma:m's poetry. 320 I. Types of semantic -oddity in Abu: Tamma:m 's poetry. 321 1 . Semantic redundancy. 327 2. Semantic 'absurdity'. 332 II. Figurative language in Abu: Tamma:m's poetry. 341 III. Abu: Tamma:m's metaphors: violations of usual lexical associations. 362 IY. Aspects of metaphor in Abu: Tamma: m's poetry. 373 General Conclusion 386 Bibliography 390 TRANSCRIPTION ^ (Traditional Tunisian Pronunciation of Classical .Arabic) I . Consonants: 2 The glottal stop, h The voiced glottal fricative, ft The voiceless pharyngeal fricative, e The voiced pharyngeal fricative, q The emphatic uvular plosive, x The voiceless velar fricative, y The voiced velar fricative, k The voiceless velar plosive, y The palatal frictionless continuant. / The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, j The voiced palato-alveolar fricative. 1 The lateral alveolar. r The rolled alveolar. n The nasal alveolar. s The voiceless alveolar fricative. s The voiceless emphatic alveolar fricative. z Thefvoiced alveolar fricative. t The voiceless dental plosive. d The voiced dental plosive. t The voiceless emphatic dental plosive. d The voiced emphatic dental plosive. t_ The voiceless dental fricative. d The voiced dental fricative. d The voiced emphatic dental fricative. f The voiceless labio-dental fricative, m The nasal bilabial, b The voiced bilabial plosive, w The bilabial frictionless continuant. TT. Vowels: In the broad transcription of Arabic texts encountered in this work, only the three principal vowels of Arabic and their long counterparts are represented: a/a: , u/u: , i/i: The different allophones of any one of these vowels are represented by the same symbol, notwithstanding that they may be articulated in different areas. X I X . Oh. the use *of jaypKens: Xn tine tine "transcription of Arabic texts*, liypTaens are used to mark wor A - boundaries which fa ll within one syllable, and sep&~ -rate from words suck grammatical items as articles, conjunctions, ate. NOTES ON TRANSLATION Apart from Abu: Tamma:mfs poem on the conquest of Ammorium [Vol. I, pp. 40-7^, 71 lines] which has been translated by A.J. Arberry,1 all quotations from A.T.'s huge poetic collection have been translated by the present author. As expected, this is an extremely difficult task, and the main endeavour has been to remain as close to the original as seemed possible, attempting to convey the spirit of Arabic to the reader while aiming at the same time at the preservation of English idiom. The language of Abu: Tamma:mfs poetry is strongly marked by archaic overtones which relate it very closely to the old poems of Classical Arabic.