Abstract
This essay examines fragments of a type of medieval Iberian poetry discarded in the storage room or Genizah of a Cairo synagogue. I argue that rather than having suffered a single fragmentation, the poems, known as muwashshahas, have been modified and broken apart according to the interests of their diverse users. To examine the mobility of these poems across multiple cultures, religions, and vast geographies and temporalities, in addition to the creative, material, and scholarly motivations that led to their successive fragmentations, I examine poems of or related to Yehuda Halevi and Moshe ibn Ezra.
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Notes
Arabic and Hebrew words are used here without diacritics for ease of reading, except in the case of quoted material.
Samuel Armistead wrote in 1987 that this was a moot point (Armistead, 1987, 11).
Karaism is a Jewish doctrine that bases its tenets on scripture alone, rejecting rabbinism and talmudism.
Because of the haplography of the first Arabic letter ba and confusion of the Arabic letter ya with ba.
For this and the following poetic citations, I render a Spanish translation into English. In this case, Emilio García Gómez: ‘Una muchacha, que de amor presa / Sufre desdenes y sufre ausencia, / así llorando cantó su pena’ (García Gómez, 1965, 160–163).
‘¡Si vieras a tu amigo muerto de amor, / sin que ame su corazón en el mundo sino a ti! / Mañana de Pascua sería verte, / aunque sea de hierro tu corazón’ (Ibn Quzmān, 1984, 138).
‘Quien está en Pascua [fi l’id] lejos de su amado, / aunque venga con sus galas y perfumes, / muestra en su cantar lo que sufre; / la Pascua no consiste en túnica, bonete y oler perfume; / Pascua es tan sólo el encuentro con el amado’ (Corriente, 1997, 127).
‘He agotado en el pulido brillo mis palabras; / señora de apariencia hermosa, cede, / pues sólo tú eres mi anhelo, / por el Profeta, que en tu fausto rostro vi mi Pascua [ssa’idi]’ (Corriente, 1997, 128).
See Cole (2007, 152–230) for a translation of Halevi's poem of friendship to Moshe ibn Ezra.
See Halkin (2010, 77) for this other poem featuring Yosef (a short elegy for Yehuda ibn Ezra).
For a full account of the biblical references in this muwashshaha, see Sola-Solé (1973, 194–195).
I translate Sáenz-Badillos and Targarona: ‘El canto del hermano separado es en mi corazón llama; / canta como la doncella que tiene el corazón inquieto, / porque es su tiempo y no llega el amado’ (Halevi et al, 1994, 203–205).
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Bamford, H. Ruins in motion. Postmedieval 4, 192–204 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.7