Poetry
ديوان أبي نواس
Not translated into English
Abu Nuwas · 800
Synopsis
Wine poems that describe the cup, the tavern and the drinking companion; love pieces addressed to boys and to women; hunting poems, a genre he was the first to treat for its own sake; eulogies of caliphs and viziers, elegies and satires; mockery of the custom of weeping over the abandoned campsites of Bedouin poetry; and, to close, poems of penance in which the poet asks God for his forgiveness.
Context
The poet did not gather his poems himself. According to Ewald Wagner, the collection has reached us through two main recensions: that of al-Suli, who set aside what he considered apocryphal, and that of Hamza al-Isfahani, who admitted everything, three times as large and numbering nearly fifteen hundred pieces. The arrangement is by genre and not by order of composition. The poet himself appears as a character in several stories of the Thousand and One Nights.
Who it is for
Short pieces, easily accessible in French thanks to a selection of seventy-four poems translated by Vincent-Mansour Monteil.
Prizes and reception
Its author was regarded in his time as one of the greatest poets in the Arabic language and as the first representative of the modern poets of the Abbasid period.