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PARTISAN REVIEW
for the extravagance that her husband lavished on her, but did she write or
improvise not a line worth keeping in al-Mutamid's brilliant court? Princess
Wallada, again, figures for a breathless month or two as lover and corre–
spondent of the young poet Ibn Zaydun (1003-70), and then quite soon she
IS
gone.
As
for Hafsa Bint Al-Hajj Ar-Rakuntyya (1135-91), whose erudition
and beauty were legendary in Granada, her poems were preserved out of
piety toward someone else: the family of her lover, the poet Abu ja'far
Ahmad ibn Sa'id, who was crucified in Malaga in 1163, kept her manuscripts
together with his. Later the chronicler al-Maqqari threaded some of her
poems together with a tinsel of conjecture and hearsay.
Did Hafsa renounce poetry at the age of twenty-eight because ofAbu
ja'far's horrible death? All we know is that nothing survives of what she
might have written during the second half of her life, some ofwhich she spent
in safe hands as a tutor to the royal princesses in Marrakesh, where she died.
The translations that follow are indirect; they are from Spanish ver–
sions. All of the originals are in classical Arabic verse, metrical and rhymed.
The commentary with which we introduce Hafsa includes but abridges that
of al-Maqqari for poems 5 and 6 and two relevant poems by Abu ja'far.
Poems 8 through 17 speak for themselves; Hafsa in love announces,
through a veil of conventional phrasing, the pulse and presence of a universe,
but her real cry of grief is heart-rending still.
* * *
While still quite young, Hafsa wrote the following poem for a lady who
asked for evidence of her skill in versification and calligraphy. The poem is as
discreet and self-reflexive as Hafsa herself seems
to
have been:
(I)
Highborn beautiful lady,
do not look too close when you see,
who are kindness itself,
the lines traces by this pen of mine,
but look upon them with love
passing over the faults
in content and in calligraphy
When she was about twenty-three (1158-9) Hafsa travelled to Rabat
in Morocco with a company of nobles and poets. There, at the court ofCaliph
Abd al-Mu'min, she wrote to the great man this miniature supplication:
