HAMASA

This beautifully-produced edition makes one of the most famous works of Arabic Literature newly available in clear and legible Antiqua type. Although the earliest examples of pre-Islamic Bedouin poetry date back to the 5th and 6th centuries, they were only made available in anthologies from the 8th century onwards. In his anthology “Hamasa”, Abu Temmam (804/806–846) succeeded in creating a ‘treasury of quotations’ which, both in form and content, did full justice to the open-mindedness of his contemporaries and their expectations of a ‘renaissance of originality’. What distinguishes his anthology is above all the fact that he included excerpts and fragments of poems by lesser-known authors, his ultimate concern being for the beauty of the selected texts. The Hamasa enjoyed such success that it had many imitators over the centuries. The German writer, orientalist and linguistic genius Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) published an exemplary translation of the anthology in the mid-19th century, which conveys perfectly its intellectual content and sensitively reflects in German the poetry of the originals.