Book of Rain

(Paperback)

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Description

The contents of the future are the contents of a cloud.

So begins translator David Larsen's introduction for the Book of Rain by ancient Arabic linguist and hadith narrator Ab Zayd Sa'd ibn Aws al-Anr. While far from a definitive list, The Book of Rain is the earliest known catalogue of Arabic weather-words. In Larsen's translation, Ab Zayd's lexicography of rain is simultaneously an academic, archival, and poetic pursuit.

These rich, extensive lists provide detailed descriptions of "The Dribble," "The Discharge," "The Flat," "The Beetle-Brow," and "The Nebuline"-all specific types of rain-as well as words for frosts, dews, thunder, lightning, clouds, and, of course, the various and plentiful words for waters. Coupled with Larsen's introduction, The Book of Rain is a source of endless interdisciplinary inquiry which is sure to fascinate readers for years (if not centuries) to come.

Reviews

Previous praise for Names of the Lion:

In this remarkable work of translation and discovery David Larsen makes available to us what we can now read as a powerful old/new act of poetic naming. Not composed as poetry in the familiar sense, Ibn KhalawayhsNames of the Lioncomes alive today as a further example of Emersons definition of the poet as namer and language-maker. Larsens careful and groundbreaking translation, presented here in its entirety, is well worth a reading and celebration as an instance of pre-modern assemblage brought into the framework of a new poetics.

Jerome Rothenberg
Larsens lyrical rendering of each name, based on extensive research into its etymological and cultural roots, does justice to its lexicographically-meticulous source, while at the same time creating something entirely new... The names of the lion, obsessively enumerated, become a poetic meditation on languages exuberant attempts to convey the ineffable. Yet through its five hundred epithets, the creature itself does begin to take shape and the reader comes face to face with the lion: so glorious in myth, so awful in reality.
Phoebe Carter,Kenyon Review
A fascinating volume. Everything in these pages emerges from the 350 names attributed to the mythologised creature of the lion. Through the careful, obsessively detailed index, and alongside the retelling of Arabic grammarians arguments, arises a fascinating account of the lavish and important workings of nominal attribution. Its all in a name, all in a grain of sand, all in a snowflake, all in a mane.
Caroline Bergvall
A mystifying and delightful treatise that conveys, as few other texts do, the voluminousness of the classical Arabic language and its poetic resources. Its author was a literary celebrity during a period crowded with savants, and his idiosyncratic genius is on full display in this astonishingly erudite but wonderfully readable book.
Elias Muhanna
A huge piece of labor, and utterly fascinating. . . . If you can, it is well worth getting hold of Wave Bookss lovely paperback editions ofThe Names of the Lion, as an aesthetically beautiful book, an entrancing piece of literature, and an intriguing, even for the non-specialist, work of scholarship.
Arab Lit
As with Gertrude Steins insight cited elsewhere, a poetry of names emerges, even & sometimes most powerfully in forms & genres not associated with poetry as suchan indication of how far our own practice has come in the extension of what we identify or read as poetry.
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Author Bio

David Larsen is a U.S. poet and translator of classical Arabic texts. His translation of Ibn Khlawayh's Names of the Lion (Wave Books) received the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. A former fellow of the Library of Arabic Literature, he is at work on a bilingual edition of the poems of Jaml Buthaynah. David Larsen lives in New York City.

Ab Zayd al-Anr was a lexicographer and grammarian of the Arabic language who lived and worked in Basra, Iraq. A lifelong bachelor, his ascetic lifestyle was softened by a jovial demeanor. There was in his day no scholar of note who did not study under him, or under whom he did not study, and he conducted his own fieldwork, interviewing speakers of select tribal dialects in their Central Arabian redoubts. He was not, per se, a writer, but a teacher whose lectures on linguistic matters were much sought out and copied down as books by later generations of students. Of some forty recorded titles, six by Ab Zayd have survived to the present day; and of these, his Book of Rain is the first to be translated into any language. Ab Zayd died in Basra circa 830 CE, at the age of ninety-five.