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MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
POETRY AND POETICS

Edited by
Dan Disney · Matthew Hall
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Series Editor
David Herd, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and continued by David Herd, Modern
and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in
the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and
scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes:
social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of
authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination
(groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry
and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of
writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the
poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems.
Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward
experimental work – intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consis-
tently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and
has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of
Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social
and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to
contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herd’s editor-
ship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the field and its
significance.

Editorial Board
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University
Vincent Broqua, Université Paris 8
Olivier Brossard, Université Paris-Est
Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University
Jacob Edmond, University of Otago
Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University
Fiona Green, University of Cambridge
Abigail Lang, Université Paris Diderot
Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London
Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley
Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London
Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool
Adam Piette, University of Sheffield
Nisha Ramaya, Queen Mary University of London
Brian Reed, University of Washington
Ann Vickery, Deakin University
Carol Watts, University of Sussex

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14799
 Dan Disney · Matthew Hall
Editors

New Directions
in Contemporary
Australian Poetry
Editors
Dan Disney Matthew Hall
Sogang University Deakin University
Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Williamstown, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2634-6052 ISSN 2634-6060 (electronic)

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
ISBN 978-3-030-76286-5 ISBN 978-3-030-76287-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76287-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
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 Praise for New Directions in
Contemporary Australian Poetry

“Dan Disney and Matthew Hall have produced a critical anthology that is
much more than a showcase for a particular poetic nationalism. Rather, as
their twenty poet-critics demonstrate so elegantly, the aim is to remodel
poetic community itself as an active site of political contestation. Whether
exploring the indigeneities that distinguish Australian poetry from others,
or exploding the common myths about its animating nature and culture,
the essays, written by the leading practitioners in their field, will force
you to rethink what it means to be an Australian poet in the twenty-first
century. An exemplary collection!”
—Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other
Means in the New Century (2010)

“New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry is a genuinely

decolonizing anthology which reveals many of Australia’s best writers
addressing us in their most cogent and renovating voices. Whereas others
would assume rhetorical innovations are enough to express resistance,
and still others would lean upon the political as a prefabricated base, the
essays and poetic inventions Disney and Hall have assembled stage a real
dialogue between affordances of ramified form and networks of critical
practice.”
—Nicholas Birns, New York University, USA

v
vi PRAISE FOR NEW DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN …

“While the nation state may be a barrier to a more interconnected prac-

tice of poetry, before crossing that line we do well to acknowledge—
even while deranging and unsettling—actually existing poetry cultures.
New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry takes on this work,
illuminating the contours and recesses, multiplicities, contraventions, and
Aboriginalities of Australian poetics with brio, ingenuity, heat, and light.
This book is notable not only for the great individual poets and poems
that it illuminates, but also for the case it makes for the power of newly
emerging poetries in Australia. All that’s left is to join the conversation.”
—Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania (Emeritus), USA

“The last decade has brought a surge in Indigenous poetry that uses
fresh modes of language to refuse the intransigent and systemic injustices
of past and present Australian settler mentality. It is timely that this book
begins with Indigenous voices. This expansive critical presentation of
Australian poetics affirms poetry as performing the work of the social
and opens the field to a future imagined as a continuum of diversities,
biopolitics, ethics, experiment, and connectivity. It’s an indispensable
resource.”
—Pam Brown, author of Missing Up (2015) and Click Here for What
We Do (2018)

“A new generation of poetry is growing from the network of song-

lines that are reconnecting across flood-ravaged highways. There are
new movements: a burgeoning Aboriginal renaissance, co-creations with
animals and plants, other diagrams for being, feeling, and belonging.
When poetic language resplices ancient myths new powers are released,
that is what this book of brilliant essays taught me: denationalise, hit the
track, listen for the songs.”
—Stephen Muecke, Flinders University, Australia

“Ambitious and playful, this collection seeks nothing less than to redraw
(to unsettle and de-range) the boundaries, histories, and practices of
Australian poetry. Disney and Hall have brought the lively and critical
voices collected here into conversation, and in doing so they illustrate
how the project of decolonising poetry in Australia is one that should be
approached with hope.”
—David McCooey, Deakin University, Australia
 Contents

Introduction: New Directions in Contemporary Australian

Poetry? 1
Dan Disney and Matthew Hall

Indigeneities
Our Poetic-Justice 15
Natalie Harkin
The Intimacy in Survival Poetics 31
Ellen van Neerven
Response to Natalie Harkin: A Labor of Love 45
Jeanine Leane
All the Trees 55
Peter Minter
Just Poetry 71
Alison Whittaker

Political Landscapes
Bordering, Dissolving, Meeting, Regenerating 85
Bonny Cassidy

vii
viii CONTENTS

Writing Unwriting Writing 97

Anne Elvey
“If You Don’t Mind Me Arsing”: Insubordination
and Land in Marty Hiatt’s the manifold 107
Michael Farrell
Against Place (the Lyrebird Shows the Way) 119
Stuart Cooke
Disembodying and Reembodying the Poem as Act
of Acknowledgment of Land Rights and a Rejection
of “Property”: On Acts and Actioning of Environmentally
Concerned Poetry 133
John Kinsella

Space, Place, Materiality

Space, Place, Materiality in Contemporary Australian
Poetry 145
Justin Clemens
Archiving the Undercommons: An Infrastructural Reading
of Contemporary Australian Poetry 159
Kate Lilley
The Antipodal Avant-Gardes: Chronometrics 171
A. J. Carruthers
New Australian Poetry: Deranged and Teeming 183
Jill Jones
The Work of Poetry 193
Astrid Lorange

Revising an Australian ‘Mythos’

Poets, Truths, and Australia 207
Ali Alizadeh
Revising an Australian Mythos 217
Ann Vickery
 CONTENTS ix

On Machines and Metamorphoses: Notes Toward a Future

Australian Mythos 229
Bella Li
Revisionist Myth Cycles and the State of Poetry 239
Louis Armand
Shadowlands, or Somewhere in the Australian Odyssey 251
Michelle Cahill
Afterword: The Province of L’Avenir 265
Philip Mead

Index 273
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 Notes on Contributors

Ali Alizadeh is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Australia. His

books include Marx and Art (2019), the collections of poetry Towards
the End (2020), Ashes in the Air (2011), and Eyes in Times of War
(2006), and the works of fiction The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc (2017),
Transactions (2013), and The New Angel (2008).
Louis Armand directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at
Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the novels The Garden
(2020), The Combinations (2016), and Clair Obscur (2011). In addition,
he has published collections of poetry, including Letters from Ausland
(2011), Indirect Objects (2014), and Monument (with John Kinsella,
2020). He is the author of Videology (2015) and The Organ-Grinder’s
Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013), and is formerly an editor
of VLAK magazine. www.louis-armand.com.
Michelle Cahill has Goan-Anglo Indian heritage. Her book Letter to
Pessoa (2016) won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing.
She is the author of three collections of poetry, including Vishvarupa
(2019) and The Herring Lass (2016). She has received several prizes and
grants in poetry and fiction from the Australia Council, the Copyright
Agency Limited, and an Australian Postgraduate Award. She was Poetry
Fellow at Kingston Writing School, London and a Visiting Scholar at
UNC Charlotte. Her criticism has appeared in Sydney Review of Books,
The Weekend Australian, Westerly, Southerly, and Wasafari.

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

A. J. Carruthers is a literary critic and poet, author of Stave Sightings:

Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems (2017), Axis
Book 1: Areal (2014), and Axis Book 2 (2019). As a critic, he works in
the areas of general literary criticism, rhetoric, theory, history, divination,
and various kinds of poetics, Antipodal, North American and Eastern. He
works in the School of Languages and Literature, Shanghai University of
International Business and Economics (SUIBE).
Bonny Cassidy is the author of three poetry collections and numerous
essays on Australian writing. She was co-editor with Jessica L. Wilkinson
of the anthology Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (2016) and
has previously been Reviews Editor at Cordite Poetry Review. Bonny
lectures in Creative Writing and is a facilitator of the Bundyi Girri (Shared
Futures) program at RMIT University. She lives in Dja Dja Wurrung
Country in Castlemaine, Victoria.
Justin Clemens writes poetry and criticism. His books of poetry include:
Limericks, Philosophical and Literary (2019); The Mundiad (2013); and
Villain (2013). Among his critical works are Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou
(2014), co-written with A. J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe; Psychoanalysis is
an Antiphilosophy (2013); and Minimal Domination (2011). He has also
helped to translate several works of French philosophy, including Alain
Badiou’s Happiness (2019) and The Pornographic Age (2020), and has
edited many scholarly collections on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain
Badiou, Jacques Lacan, and Jacqueline Rose. His current research is on
Barron Field, who published the first book of poetry in Australia. He is
an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Stuart Cooke’s books include Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a theory
for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics (2013) and the poetry collec-
tions Lyre (2019), Opera (2016), and Edge Music (2011). He is a senior
lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University.
Dan Disney has published four collections of poetry, and his writing
appears in Angelaki, Kenyon Review, Antipodes, Orbis Litterarum, and
CounterText. He is an associate editor with the Journal of English
Language and Literature, and a regular reviewer with World Litera-
ture Today. He teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang
University, in Seoul.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Anne Elvey lives in Boonwurrung Country in Seaford, Victoria.

Managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, Anne holds honorary appointments at Monash
University and University of Divinity. Poetry collections include On
arrivals of breath (2019), White on White (2018), Kin (2014), and
Intatto/Intact (co-authored with Massimo D’Arcangelo and Helen
Moore, 2017). Scholarly publications include Ecological Aspects of War:
Engagements with Biblical Texts (co-edited with Keith Dyer and Deborah
Guess, 2017) and The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between
Luke and the Five Senses (2011).
Michael Farrell is from Bombala NSW, now living in Melbourne. He
has a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne: his revised thesis was
published as Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Inven-
tion 1796–1945 (2015). Michael’s books of poetry include Family Trees
(2020), I Love Poetry (2017), A Lyrebird (2017), and Cocky’s Joy (2015).
He also edited Ashbery Mode (2019), as well as (with Jill Jones) Out of the
Box: Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (2009). He edits a poetry maga-
zine, Flash Cove. He is an adjunct fellow at Curtin University, and has a
mid-career critic’s fellowship at Sydney Review of Books.
Matthew Hall holds a doctorate from the University of Western
Australia. He is the author of numerous books, including the monograph
On Violence in the work of J.H. Prynne, and has published scholarship
with Angelaki, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and The Journal of British
and Irish Innovative Poetry, among others. He works as a designer and
education consultant in Melbourne, Australia.
Natalie Harkin is a Narungga woman and activist-poet from South
Australia. She is a Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University with an
interest in decolonizing state archives, engaging archival-poetic methods
to document Aboriginal women’s domestic service and labor histories in
South Australia. Her words have been installed and projected in exhi-
bitions comprising text-object-video projection, including creative-arts
research collaboration with the Unbound Collective. She has published
widely, including with literary journals Overland, Westerly, Southerly,
The Lifted Brow, Wasafiri International Contemporary Writing, TEXT ,
and Cordite. Her poetry collections include Dirty Words (2015), and
Archival-poetics (2019).
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jill Jones was born in Sydney and has lived in Adelaide since 2008. She
is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at University of
Adelaide, as well as a widely published poet. In 2015 she won the Victo-
rian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Recent books
include Wild Curious Air (2020), A History Of What I’ll Become (2020),
and Viva the Real, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s
Literary Award for Poetry and the 2020 John Bray Award. Her work has
been translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian, and
Spanish.
John Kinsella’s most recent poetry volumes include Drowning in
Wheat: Selected Poems (2016), Open Door (2018), The Wound (2018),
and Insomnia (2019). He has also written fiction, criticism, and plays,
and often works in collaboration with other writers, artists, and musi-
cians. His critical books include Disclosed Poetics (2006), Activists Poetics
(ed. Niall Lucy; 2010), Spatial Relations (2013), Polysituatedness (2017),
and Temporariness (co-written with Russell West-Pavlov; 2018). He is a
Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of Liter-
ature and Environment, Curtin University, Western Australia. He has lived
in various places around the world, but mainly in the Western Australian
wheatbelt.
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet, essayist, and academic from
southwest New South Wales. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have
been published in Hecate: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liber-
ation, The Journal of the Association of European Studies of Australia,
Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Sydney Review of Books, Best
Australian Poems, Overland, and Australian Book Review. She has
published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, poetry, writing other-
ness, and creative non-fiction. Her research interests concern the political
nature of literary representation, cultural appropriation of minority voices
and stories, and writing identity and difference.
Bella Li has a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, and is the author
of Argosy (2017), which won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary
Award for Poetry and the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry,
and Lost Lake (2018), shortlisted for the 2018 QLD Literary Award for
Poetry. Her writing and artwork have been published in journals and
anthologies including Australian Book Review, The Best Australian Poems,
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Kenyon Review, and Archives of American Art Journal. She is also an

editor and book publisher.
Kate Lilley is an Honorary Associate Professor of English at the Univer-
sity of Sydney where she specializes in wide-ranging queer feminist literary
history and intermedia poetics. She is the editor of Margaret Cavendish:
The Blazing World (1994) and Dorothy Hewett: Selected Poems (2010)
and the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Versary (2002),
winner of the Grace Leven Prize; Ladylike (2012), and Tilt (2018), winner
of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. Follow her work at https://
sydney.academia.edu/KateLilley.
Astrid Lorange is a writer, editor, and teacher from Sydney, Australia.
She lectures at UNSW Art & Design, and is the author of How Reading
is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein (2014) and Labour and Other
Poems (2020). She is one-half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate.
She researches social infrastructures, networks of care, and histories and
futures of intimacy.
Philip Mead was born in Brisbane and educated in Queensland, the
U.K. and in the United States. From 2009 to 2018 he was inaugural
Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. From
1987 to 1994 he was Poetry Editor of Meanjin Quarterly magazine and
Lockie Fellow in Creative Writing and Australian Literature in the English
Department, University of Melbourne. He has edited The Penguin Book
of Modern Australian Poetry (1992), with John Tranter, and edited selec-
tions of poetry by Frank Wilmot, Selected Poetry and Prose (1997) and
David Campbell, Hardening of the Light (2007). In 2009 he published
a critical study, Networked Language: History & Culture in Australian
Poetry and in 2018 a collection of poetry, Zanzibar Light.
Peter Minter is a poet, poetry editor, and writer on poetry and poetics.
His books include Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin (1995), Empty Texas (1998),
blue grass (2006), and In the Serious Light of Nothing (2014). He was
a founding editor of Cordite poetry magazine, poetry editor for leading
Australian journals Meanjin, and Overland, and has co-edited antholo-
gies such as Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (2000) and the
Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008). He teaches
at the University of Sydney in Indigenous Studies, Creative Writing, and
Australian Literature.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ellen van Neerven is a First Nations Australian writer and editor from
Mununjali Yugambeh country in South East Queensland. Ellen’s books
include the award-winning fiction collection Heat and Light (2014), and
the poetry collections Comfort Food (2016) and Throat (2020).
Ann Vickery is Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin
University. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Femi-
nist Genealogy of Language Writing (2000), and Stressing the Modern:
Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (2007). She co-authored
The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (2009) and co-
edited Poetry and the Trace (2013). She is the author of three poetry
collections, Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Carepack (2021), Devious
Intimacy (2015), and The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon (2014). She
was editor-in-chief of HOW2, an online journal on innovative women’s
writing and scholarship, and co-founder of the Australasian Modernist
Studies Network.
Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi woman from Gunnedah. She is a Senior
Researcher at the Jumbunna Institute. Her second book, BLAKWORK
(2018), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the
Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and received the Queensland Literary
Award for Poetry.
 Introduction: New Directions
in Contemporary Australian Poetry?

Dan Disney and Matthew Hall

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian

poetry. In tracing a cartography wherein the past has shaped processes of
becoming, New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry focuses on
fields of the possible, on the field in flux. This anthology of possible ideas
emerges generationally after other Australian writers who have, in their
own ways, sought to explore the possibilities of Australian writing. Each
essay in this book works to the logic of A.J. Carruthers’ assertion that
“a poetics-minded anthology can still provide a social model of literary
community,” a commons with a global reach that exists outside, or in
contestation of, settled accounts of a nationalist–statist framework (21).
In modeling the potentialities of community, the essays gathered into this
collection constitute a step toward recalibrating our compositional coordi-
nates. Energetically thinking toward such possibilities, after Philip Mead’s
Networked Language (2008), we maintain the essays here intervene,
problematize, and perhaps may precipitate a restructuring and “radical

D. Disney (B)
Sogang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
M. Hall
Deakin University, Williamstown, VIC, Australia

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
D. Disney and M. Hall (eds.), New Directions in Contemporary
Australian Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76287-2_1
2 D. DISNEY AND M. HALL

reformulation of stories of language and nation—how is it defined? who

belongs to it? who gets to imagine it?” (401).
While not an especially new or novel claim, that “Australia” has long
been a contested site outside geographic or cultural specificity remains an
ethos that anchors New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Extending Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s acknowledgment that
there is no one feminist voice defining Australian feminist writing (xii),
this book similarly seeks to make room for heterogeneous multitudes
and the potent possibilities that can arrive when multiple creatives gather
together a constellation of revelatory ideas. We acknowledge our indebt-
edness to Martin Harrison’s Who Wants to Create Australia? (2004), and
note also Corey Wakeling’s prescient introduction to Outcrop: Radical
Australian Poetry of Land (2013), which articulates belief in “poetry’s
potential for critique and dissent, but too the possibility of recupera-
tion and efflorescence of land’s multiplicity in a theatre of language”
(9). Our anthology is especially indebted to Philip Mead’s critical read-
ings of Australian poetry, through which he understands how “[l]anguage
persists as a site of political contestation and continually emergent reali-
ties in contemporary Australian life” (421). As this country edges toward
the 250th year since British colonization, we hope this book formalizes
some of Mead’s transformative work. Asserting an abundance of critical
(and we argue constitutional) angles, each essay here demonstrates how
to write back against “Australianized” infrastructural scenes.
Following Andrew Taylor’s Reading Australian Poetry (1987)
via Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s essay “The Solitary Shapers” (1974), in
Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity (1996) Paul Kane asserts
the absence of romanticism in this country “has functioned as a gener-
ative presence […] for each significant poet has had to come to terms
with the lack of an indigenous cultural origin” (203). Of course, Kane’s
survey of a cadre of canonized Australian specters occludes an account of
those forces (imperial, epistemic) which empower and historicize specific
modes of language and its uses. In his essay for this anthology, Justin
Clemens extends Kane to venture how British romanticism, relocated,
“is essentially integrated with the colonial state form and its institu-
tions of education, publication, and policing” (p. 148). Those discourse
formations have endured into and across the twentieth century, causing
some Australian poets to narrowly interpolate coordinates in which “we’re
country, and Western” (Murray 64). Are Australians and their poets to
remain as if provincial Boeotians displaced in the so-called Terra nullius
 INTRODUCTION: NEW DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY … 3

of a so-called new world (Murray contra Porter)? This anthology parlays

a paradigmatic, discursive adjustment. Rather than taking “the guise of
a reproduced, lesser version of British culture” (Rudy 4), can recently
emerged contemporary Australian poetries be read as fomenting newly
inclusive visions of community and cultural identity? Writing at the end
of the twentieth century, Kane foresees “an important change” on the
horizon, in which “Australian poetry itself is the frame within which
Australian poets are writing” (204). This book ventures through that
turn, toward the future, and away from colonial forms that have too long
endured, unchallenged.
In Writing Australian Unsettlement (2015), Michael Farrell forays
into the biopolitical, and embraces the task of “unsettling” Australian
literature by reading colonial texts as an archive of violently constitu-
tional forms. Similar to that book’s imperative to shift away from unitary
literary hagiographies, this anthology also seeks to reframe the past so
as to contest and assert futures in which as-yet unwritten Australian
poetries shift beyond “authoritative, dogmatic, and conservative” tropes
(Bakhtin 287). This anthology presupposes a future which has “com[e]
to terms with the unsettling difference of Indigenous narratives of place
and history and the plural knowledges of the multicultural present”
(Mead 401). The “difference” Mead asserts is both culturally defined and
delimits ontologies; in taking his lead, this book takes the opportunity to
push back against any position that would remain indifferent to language
as an agent which irradiates power to create not only difference but also
structures of oppression. This remains relevant to the historical discourse
of “Australian poetry” for, as John Kinsella asserts “[t]he machine of
state has many guises, and the poetry industry is one of them” (51). In
mapping the emergence of a disparate and loosely connected network
of ethically minded, critically savvy, and diverse voices, this book nour-
ishes newer possibilities. We remain optimistic that the critical framings
presented here may cause readers to dare to hope.

∗ ∗ ∗

Casting a critical gaze over the work of Slessor, Hope, Wright, Murray,
et al., Kane’s book argues “for a continuity of romantic concerns in
Australian poetry, even as [it attempts] to show that romanticism as a
cultural movement did not actually occur in Australia” (4). But when re-
emplotting the much-told historical story of canonized white Australian
4 D. DISNEY AND M. HALL

poets as merely dislocated from a tradition, Kane’s book also enshrines as

unproblematic those hegemonic cultural machineries which perform and
murderously actuate exclusion. This line of argument endures, preserving
and privileging various national conservatisms which, broadly, commen-
tators in the current anthology will refer to as a kind of settler logic. We
understand this as a trope which is spoken directly from colonial anxi-
eties and which makes visible a so-called absence or negativity which (as
we read it) participates in a mythologizing that re-conceals oppressed
and often violently silenced others. In response, the current text seeks
to provide a forum in which highly literate contemporary Australian
poet-critics cauterize extant mythologies of Australian-ness. We hope the
languages of this book remain part of its impact; that these discussions
can act as maps guiding readers onto next modes of knowing, naming,
and performing reassertions of who, what, how, and why an “Australian
poetry” might be. This book has very little interest in clarifying a homo-
geneous dialect, but seeks instead to make voluminous (and exemplary)
a multi-voiced community’s interventions in asserting new possibilities of
creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.
Whether we are the linguistic descendants of antipodean inflections
of a romantic vacuity (Kane contra Taylor) or spring from lineages
in which modernity and postmodernity have been coeval, creating a
milieu “in which experiment [has long been] more or less mandatory”
(Haskell 266), the twenty essays in this anthology indicate how a suite
of newer visions may traverse increasingly extreme landscapes, intent on
interfering with some of those nationalizing mythologies that instru-
mentalize and render our lands precarious. Certainly, some may remain
skeptical toward this book’s claims for “new directions,” and will call to
attention other anthologies such as Tom Shapcott and Rodney Hall’s
New Impulses in Australian Poetry (1968), a book which two gener-
ations ago purported to showcase “the accomplishments of Australian
poetry in breaking fresh ground during the past decade” (1). We assert
that the critical commentaries contained herein perform a different kind
of groundwork, exemplifying how critical engagements remain funda-
mental to any creative stance seeking to critique power relations so as
to redress historical imbalances. Each poet in this book writes tenden-
tiously, and criticality informs creative output. Breaching the 200-year-old
systems of Australian identity, no poet in New Directions in Contemporary
Australian Poetry is “taking nationality for granted” (Shapcott 5).
Visit https://ebookmass.com today to explore
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Arafshah = superintendent, 20.
Árám (pl. of Irm), a beautiful girl, a white deer (tr. “Reems”) 43.
Arwà written with a terminal yá is a woman’s P.N. in Arabic, 94.
Asár, clerical error for Sár = Vendetta, blood revenge, 134.
’Ashshár or Tither, 243.
Ásí (Al-) = rebel, syn. with Pers. “Yághí,” 134.
Asmá al-Adwíyah = names of the medicines, 283.
Athr = sign, mark, trail (tr. “Scar”), 280.
Atráf (pl. of “Tarf”) = great and liberal lords (tr. “chiefs”), 58.
Aulád-i = sons (vulg. plural for dual) 132.
’Awán lit. = aids, helpers (tr. “guards”), 253.
Áward o burd (Pers.) = brought and bore away, 210.

Badawi dogs dangerous, 316.

Badrah lit. a myriad, ten thousand dirhams, 278.
Bahluwán (Arab. for Pers. Pahluwán) = a brave, a warrior, 131.
Bahrjaur (in Pers. Bahr-i-Jaur = luck of Jaur-city), 57.
Bakht (i) Zamán (Persian) = Luck of the Time, 102.
Bákiyah = may also mean Eternal, as opposed to Fániyah =
temporal (tr. “abide”), 39.
Bákúlat = pot-herbs (tr. “almond cakes”), probably clerical error for
“Bakláwát,” 261.
Bandukah = a little bunduk, nut, bullet, etc. (tr. “degrees”), 353.
Banj akrítashí = Cretan Bhang, 9.
Banú Tay, the tribe of the chieftain and poet Hátim Táí, 179.
Barniyah = Pot (in which manna was collected), 265.
Bashárah, can hardly be applied to ill news (faulty text), 34.
Bastinado used to extort confession, 148.
Bathá = lowlands and plains outside Meccan Valley, 42.
Bathah = inner court, 284.
Bayn farsi-k wa ’l-damí = lit. between fæces and menses (tr. “thy
droppings and drippings”), 41.
Bazaka = brought out, 209.
Beating the bosom with a sunbaked brick, 34.
Bi al-Salám = in the Peace (of Allah), 6.
Bihkamál (Pers. and Arab.) = “Good Perfection,” 107.
Bihkard = “Well he did,” 107.
Bihzad (Persian) = Bih (well, good) Zád (born), 89.
Bilal = moisture, beneficence, etc., 40.
Bir al-Khátim = Well of the signet, 165.
Blood moved between them (a “pathetic fallacy”), 77.
Blowing a man up with bellows, 351.
Book of Bakhtyar (Persian Bakhtyár Námeh) “The ten Wazirs, etc.,”
55.
Bostán al-Nuzhah = the Garden of Pleasance, 29.
Breslau Edition quoted, 1, 4, 15, 25, 39, 42, 47, 51, 55, 58, 60, 121,
131, 134, 159, 165, 171, 175, 179, 185, 191, 266, 334, 359.
Bunúd (pl. of Pers. “band”) = hypocrisy, deceit (tr. “quiddities”), 353.
Burúj (pl. of Burj) = lit. towers (tr. “mansions”), 353.
Bystanders excited about some matter in no way concerning them,
303.

Caliph can do no wrong, 167.

Caliph Omar bin Abd al-Aziz (The Good Caliph), 39.
Chaugán (Persian) = the crooked bat used in polo, 109.
Chavis and Cazotte quoted, 55, 60, 65, 73, 81, 89, 94, 95, 97, 102,
103, 107, 112, 121, 131, 147. 151.
Circumstantial evidence not lawful amongst Moslems, 112.
Cloud of Locusts believed by Arabs to be led by a King locust (the
Sultan Jarád), 305.
Cock-speak = a natural clock called by West Africans Cokkerapeek,
10.
Condition of forfeits (lit. order and acceptance), 175.
Cuckold, origin of, 205.
“Cut the way” = became a highwayman, 90.
Cutting the way (i.e., waylaying travellers), 60.

Dabbús = a mace, 95.

Dád-bín (Persian) = one who looks to justice, 94.
Daïs (place of honour), 16.
Dánik (Pers. “Dáng”) = one-sixth of a dirham, i.e., about a penny
halfpenny, 245.
Dar al-Salam = Abode of Peace, 11.
Dastí = thou trampledst, 146.
Dates and cream (“Proud rider on the desired steed”), 59.
Dawn prayer, 13.
Days in Moslem year 354 (= 6 months of 29 days and the rest of
30), 245.
Descended = Come down from Heaven, 333.
Devil may not open a door shut in Allah’s name, 21.
Diamond does not grow warm whilst held in the hand, 215.
Dirhams—

50 = about 40 shillings, 300.

5,500 = about £220, shillings, 300.
1,000,000 = about £25,000, shillings, 161.

Died of laughter (now become familiar to English speech), 13.

Dihkán, in Persian = a villager (tr. “village headman”), 81.
Dismantled his shop (removing goods from the “but” to the “ben”),
207.
Doghrí = assuredly, 18.
(They) Draw thee near to them = they make much of thee, 2.
Dress (a Moslem should dress for public occasions), 159.
Dyed robe (Abbasides, black; Ommiades, white; Fatimites, green),
160.

Elopements of frequent occurrence, 317.

Eunuchs, 70.
Eyes swollen by swathes, 30.

Fákhir (Al-) = the potter, 360.

Faras = a mare (tr. “horses”), 216.
Fáris = a Rider (tr. “horseman”), 103.
Fars = Persia, 282.
Fárs (Al-) = Persians (a people famed for cleverness and
debauchery), 2.
Fazl (Caliph’s foster-brother), 166.
“Feet towards Mecca,” 34.
Fighting rams, 210.
Fí-hi = “In him” (i.e., either Mahommed) or “in it” (his action), 40.
Firásah lit. = judging the points of a mare (tr. “physiognomy”), 286.
Fire lighted to defend mother and babe from bad spirits, 279.
First day = our Sunday, 286.
Fírúz (Pers. “Píroz”) = Victorious, triumphant, 185.
Forehead (compared with a page of paper upon which Destiny writes
her decrees), 100.
Futúh (Al-) lit. = the victories (tr. “the honorarium”), 285.

Ghazbán = an angry man, 265.

Ghawwásún = divers (tr. “duckers”), 68.
Ghusl or complete ablution after car. cop., 220.
Goat’s droppings (used as fuel, also for practical jokes), 288.
Guide going in front, 201.

Hadas = moved (“event,” a word not easy to translate), 321.

Hádí (Al-) Fourth Abbaside (A.D. 785–786), 165.
Hájib = Chamberlain, 324.
“Hajj” never applied to the Visitation (Ziyárah) at Al-Medinah, 196.
Hajj (Al-) = the company of pilgrims (tr. “pilgrimage caravan”), 196.
Hajj al-Shárif = Holy pilgrimage, 194.
Hajjáj (Al-), 47.
Hajjat al-Islam, the Pilgrimage commanded to all Moslems, 194.
Haláwat = lit. a sweetmeat, a gratuity, a thank-offering (tr. “a
douceur”), 35.
Half of marriage settlement due to wife on divorcement, 311.
Hamadán, a well-known city of Irák ’Ajamí, 203.
Hamhama = muttered, 265.
Hammám i.e. the private bagnio, 262.
Hammám bin Ghálib al-Farazdak, a famous Christian Poet, 42.
Hanút = perfumes (leaves of the lotus tree), 290.
Haráis (pl. of Harísah) = meat puddings, 287.
Harám = “forbidden,” sinful (tr. “useless”), 72.
Harem, supposed to be in Eastern Wing of Palace, 199.
Harfúsh = Larrikin, popularly a “blackguard,” 4.
Harun al-Rashid (house still standing), 15.
Háshim = breaker, 47.
Hashimites (and Abbasides) fine specimens of the Moslem Pharisee,
159.
Hasír = mat (used for sleeping on during the hot season), 204.
“Haukalah” and “Haulakah,” 265.
Házúr (Al-) = loquacity, frivolous garrulity (tr. “jargon”), 283.
“He Pilgrimaged: quoth one, Yes, and for his villainy lives (yujáwir)
at Meccah.”—Egyptian Proverb, 196.
“He who keeps his hands crossed upon his breast, shall not see
them cut off.” 114.
Hibernicè, “kilt” for beaten, 247.
Hidden, (for fear of the “Eye”), 75.
“Hie Salvationwards” (the Words of Azán), 42.
Himyán (or Hamyán) = a girdle (tr. “purse belt”), 152.
His head forewent his feet = He fell down senseless, 17.
Ho, Tuffáhah! Ho, Ráhat al-Kulúb = O Apple, O Repose o’ Hearts,
&c., 17.
Hour (would his hour had never come), 27.
“How very good he was to me,” 32.
Hudhud (tr. “hoopoe”) called from its cry “Hood! Hood!”, 148.
Hundred dirhams = £4 (about), 43.
Hysterics, common amongst the races of the East, 198.

I am between his hands = at his service, 280.

I have not found thy heel propitious to me, 21.
Ibl, specific name for camels (tr. “certain camels”), 315.
Ibn al-Sammák = Son of the fisherman or fishmonger, 171.
Ihtidá = divine direction, 313.
Ihtirák = burning (used in the metaphorical sense of consuming,
torturing), 35.
Imám (the spiritual title of the Caliph), 43.
In a modest way (lit. In the way of moderation), 248.
’Irk al-Háshimí = the Háshimí vein, 29.

Jabr (Al-) = the tyranny (equiv. of “Civil law”), 212.

Jahl = ignorance (also wickedness), 271.
Jahrbaur (a fancy name intended to be Persian), 93.
Jálínús = “Galen” (considered by Moslems a pre-Islamitic saint), 284.
Jama’a atráfah, lit. = he drew in his extremities (tr. “covered his
hands and feet with his dress”), 114.
Jámi’ = cathedral mosque, 250.
Jamíl bin Ma’mar al-Uzri. (“Jamíl the Poet,” and lover of Buthaynah),
41.
Janzír (vulgarism for “Zanjír”) = a chain, 20.
Jarídah = Palm-frond stripped of its leaves, 264.
Jarír al-Khatafah, 39.
Járiyah = damsel, slave-girl, used instead of “Sabiyah” = young lady,
134.
Jauhar = the jewel, the essential nature of a substance (tr.
“quintessence”), 212.
Jáwar = he became a mujáwir (one who lives near a collegiate
mosque), 196.
Jewel inserted in the shoulder, 228.
Jiddan (Egypto-Syrian) = muchly, 115.
Joanna Papissa (Pope John VIII. called “Pope Joan”), 340.

Ka’b = heel, glory, prosperity, 21.

Kad = verily (affirmative particle preceding a verb gives it a present
and at times a future signification), 245.
Kádr = rank, 48.
Kahbah = whore, 12.
Káhinah = Divineress (fem. of Káhin), 279.
Kahramánah = housekeeper (also nurse, duenna, &c. &c.), 199.
Ka’id; lit. = one who sits with a colleague (tr. “Captain”), 59.
Kála al-Ráwí, etc., parenthetical formula = “The Story Teller sayeth,
etc.”, 347.
Kalb = stomach (sometimes “heart,”) 26.
Kalí = potash (our “alcali”), 8.
Kamís (χιτών, chemise, etc.) = shirt, 346.
Kanísah = a Pagan temple, a Jewish synagogue, a Christian church,
198.
Kariyah = a village (derivation), 83.
Kárdán (Persian) = Business-knower, 94.
Karmán = Karmania, vulg. and fancifully derived from Kirmán. Pers.
= worms, 59.
Kasf = houghed, 155.
Kásituna (Al-) = The Swervers, 52.
Kasr = abbreviation, 295.
Kayf, favourite word in Egypt and Syria, 58.
Khalbas (suggests Khalbús = a buffoon), 266.
Khalífah (Caliph) = a deputy, a successor (derivation), 4.
Khanádik = ditches or trenches (for Fanádik, “khans”), 288.
Khawátín (pl. of Khátún) = a matron, a lady, 122.
Khayr al-Nassáj (the Weaver), 344.
Khayyál = sturdy horseman, 320.
“Khayyál kabrhu maftúh” (proverb), 320.
Khubz Mutabbak = platter-bread, 3.
Khubz Samíz = firsts bread, 261.
Khulbah = sermon, 350.
Khwájah and Khawáját (Pers.) = merchants (Arab.), 332.
Kidr = a cooking pot, 48.
King’s Eye = Royal favour, 61.
Kisra = Kutrú (Bresl.) Kassera (Chavis and Cazotte), 60.
Kisrà = Chosroës, 97.
“Kissing him upon the mouth,” 153.
Knife and salt placed on the stomach (Ar. Kalb) to repel evil spirits,
26.
Koran quoted—
(cxii.) 25.
vi. 44, 51.
iv. 134, 52.
lxxii. 15, ib.
ii. 173, 100.
xxx. 1, 134.
xxvii., 148.
lxxxv.; xv. 26; xxv. 62, 353.
Kubbah = a dome-shaped tent (tr. “Pavilion”), 99.
Kubbah (square building with cupola), 119.
Kubúr = tombs, 295.
Kumájah = First-bread (i.e., Bread unleavened and baked in ashes),
8.
Kunaym Madúd = Kingdom of Dineroux, 55.
Kursi = Throne, 10.
Kuthayyir ’Azzah (contemporary of Jamil), 41.
Kuthayyir = “the dwarf,” 41.

Lá af’al (“I will do naught of the kind”) more commonly Má af’al,

296.
Lá baas = “No matter” or “All right,” (tr. “No harm be upon you”),
160.
Lahd, Luhd = tomb-niche, 292.
Lane, quoted, 3, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 21, 29, 31, 34, 146, 290.
Lex talionis (the essence of Moslem and all criminal jurisprudence),
100.
Liallá (i.e., li, an, lá) = lest, 140.
Libwah = lioness, 152.
Líyúth (pl. of Layth) = Lions (used for “warriors”), 14.
Long hand, or arm, means power (Arab. idiom), 114.
Long lock left on shaven poll, 233.

Maamún (Al-) Seventh Abbaside (A.H. 198–227), 175.

Mahdi (Al-) Third Abbaside (A.D. 775–785), 165.
Mahr = marriage settlement, 283.
Makán mahjúb = a retired room, 11.
Makhzúm = nose pierced, 47.
Makrán, the well-known Baloch province West of Sind, 335.
Mál = wealth, 47.
Malik Sháh = King (Arab.) King (Persian), 131.
Mansúrah (Al-) = opinions differ as to the site of, 341.
Ma’rafah (Al-) = the place where the mane grows (tr. “crest”), 298.
Máristán = Mad house, 18.
“Marrying below one,” 94.
Marwazi = Marw (derived from Sansk. Maru or Marw), 288.
Marzbán = guardian of the Marshes, 234.
Masalah = a question (tr. “catch-question”), 138.
Masarat fí-há = and she used hard words to her, 31.
Mastúrah = veiled (tr. “curtained”), 309.
Matmúrah = a silo, matamor, or “underground cell,” 84.
Maunds (fifty) = about 100 lbs., 250.
Miat wa arba’at ashar Súrat = the 114 chapters of the Alcoran, 147.
Mihrján (Al-) = the Autumnal Equinox, 129.
Milk and dates, a favourite food, 59.
Miskah = Bit o’ Musk, 16.
Moslems all know how to pray, 13.
Moslems bound to see True Believers buried, 289.
Moslems shun a formal oath, 304.
Mu’arris = pander, 206.
Munajjim = Astrologer (authority in Egyptian townlets), 66.
Munkati’ah = lit. “cut off” (from the weal of the world) tr.
“defenceless,” 337.
Munkar and Nakír, the Interrogating Angels, 294.
Muruwwah lit. = manliness, 303.
Musallà = Prayer-place, 313.
Musician, also a pederast, 209.
Mutabattil (Al-) usually = one who forsakes the world (tr. “oyster”),
215.
Muwaswas (Al-) = Melancholist, 264.

Nabíz = date-wine (or grape-wine), 160.

Nafas lit. = breath (tr. “air”), 124.
Náim (Al-) wa al-Yakzán = The Sleeper and the Waker, 1.
Nákah = She-dromedary, 315.
Náwús = Tower of Silence, 264.
“Necks” per synecdochen for heads, 47.
Negative emphatic in Arabic, 206.
Never may neighbour defy thee, etc. (May thy dwelling-place never
fall into ruin), 15.
Ním = Persian Lilac (Melia Azadirachta) used as preventive to
poison, 64.
Nímshah = half sword or dagger, 14.
Níshábúr (Arab. form of Nayshápúr = reeds of (King) Shápur), 270.
Nose (large in a woman indicating a masculine nature), 345.
Nukl-i-Pishkil = goat-dung bonbons, 288.
Nusfs = Halves (i.e., of dirhams), 300.
Nu’umán (Al-), King of the Arab kingdom of Hirah, 179.
Nuwab, (broken plur. of “Naubah,”) the Anglo-Indian Nowbut (tr.
“Drums”), 324.
Nuzhat al-Fuád = “Delight of the Vitals” (or heart), 25.

O thousand-horned (thousandfold cuckold), 247.

O vile of birth (origin (Asl) of a man held to influence his conduct
throughout life), 62.
Oath of triple divorce irrevocable, 246.
Ober-Ammergau “Miracle play,” 250.
Omar ’Adi bin Artah, 39.
Omar bin Abd al-Aziz = the good Caliph, 39.
Omar ibn Abi Rabí’ah, the Korashí (i.e. of the Koraysh tribe), 41.
Parks on the Coasts of Tropical Seas, 320.
Payne quoted, 1, 8, 11, 34, 56, 134, 165, 209, 222, 238, 278, 286,
288, 289, 306, 311, 312, 322, 327, 338, 344.
Pilgrimage quoted—
i. 18, 285.
i. 22, 337.
i. 38, 228.
i. 99, 207.
i. 100, 205.
i. 110, 42.
ii. 219, 165.
iii. 12, 194.
Pit = grave, 88.
Prayers at burial, beginning with four “Takbírs,” 290.
Prayers, whilst at, the Moslem cannot be spoken to, 197.

Ráhilah = a riding camel, 315.

Rahwán (cor. of Rahbán) = one who keeps the (right) way, 191.
Rain and bounty are synonymous, 43.
Rape, 311.
Rasátík (pl. of Rusták) = villages, 256.
Rasmál (vulg. Syrian and Egyptian form of Raas al-mál = stock in
trade) = capital in hand, 248.
Ráwi = a professional tale-teller (tr. “Seer”), 56.
Rází (Al-) = a native of Rayy City, 288.
Ring given as token to show fair play, 248.
Rising up and sitting down, usual sign of emotion, 348.
Roum = Greeks, 134.
Ruh Allah lit. = breath of Allah (tr. “Spirit of Allah”), 251.
Rumh = lance, 90.
Rusáfiyah = a cap, 160.
Rutab wa manázil = degrees and dignities, 217.

Safíh = slab over the grave (tr. “pave”), 41.

Safúl (Al-) = ranks of fighting men, or rows of threads on a loom,
48.
Sáhah = Courtyard (as opposed to “Bathah” = Inner Court), 284.
Sahará pron. Sahrá, 251.
Sails hoisted and canvas loosed (anchors weighed and canvas
spread), 321.
Sakhrah = labour, 84.
Salám pronounced after prayers, 14.
Satl = water-can (Lat. and Etruscan Situla and Situlus, a water-pot),
291.
Secret, difficult for an Eastern to keep, 342.
Seed pearls made into great pearls (also rubies and branch-coral),
197.
Service (yearly value of his fief), 256.
Shabakah = net (hung over shop during absence of shopkeeper),
205.
Shah Bakht = King Luck, 191.
Shahbán, Bresl. Edit. form of Shahryár = City Keeper, for City-friend,
334.
Sháhrazád (in Mac. Edit. Shahrázád), 334.
Shajarat al-Durr = Branch of Pearl, 12.
Shakhs mafsúd = man of perverted belief (i.e. an infidel), 352.
Shampooing (practice of), 116.
Shamúl (fem.) = liquor hung in the wind to cool, 42.
Sharif (a descendant from Mohammed), 285.
Sharr (Al-) (“the wickedness”) last city in Makran before entering
Sind, 336.
Shaykh becomes ceremonially impure by handling a corpse, 290.
Shroff (Arab Sayrafi), 298.
Shubbák = lattice (also “Mashrabiyah” = latticed balcony,) 29.
Si’at rizki-h = the ease with which he earned his livelihood (tr.
“fortune”), 282.
Silk, Moslems may be shrouded in it, 26.
Sindiyan (from the Persian) = holm-oak, 247.
Sístán (Persian) Arab. Sijistán, 56.
Slave become a King (no shame to Moslems), 348.
Soldiers serving on feudal tenure, 256.
“Some one to back us,” 135.
Sons = Men, a characteristic Arab. idiom, 2.
Stranger invites a guest during pilgrimage-time, 195.
Subjects (men who pay taxes), 256.
Suicide rare in Moslem lands, 325.
Sultanate for Women. Custom of Al-Islam, a strong precedent
against queenly rule, 350.

Ta’ám = Millet seed (tr. “grain”), 5.

Taannafú = long noses, 300.
Tabaristan (adj. Tabari, whereas Tabaráni = native of Tiberias), 94.
Ta’dilú = Swerve (also “Ye do injustice”), 52.
Tafrík wa’l-jam’a = division and union, 222.
Táí = The man of the tribe of Tay, 180.
Tákiyah = litter, 99.
Talámizah = disciples (sing. Talmíz), 251.
Tale of the Simpleton Husband (History), 239.
Tales were told before the peep of day, 359.
Tamásil = (the Pavilion of) Pictures (generally carved images), 29.
Tannúr = large earthen jar (tr. “oven-jar”), 208.
Tannúr = oven (misprint for “Kubúr” = Tombs), 265.
Tarbíyatí = rearling, 348.
Tarkah = “A gin,” a snare, 16.
Tasill sallata’l-Munkatí’ín = lit. “raining on the drouth-hardened earth
of the cut-off” (tr. “Watering the dry ground”), 345.
“That a standard be borne over his head,” 161.
“The Astrologers lied,” 122.
The babe to the blanket, and the adultress to the stone, 271.
The sumptuary laws compelling Jews to wear yellow turbans, 286.
“Thou hast done justice” (’adalta), also means “Thou hast swerved
from right.” “Thou hast wrought equitably” also = “Thou hast
transgressed,” 51.
Tither, unable to do evil, 245.
Tobáni = unbaked brick, 34.
Tohfah = A gift, 16.
Torture endured through Eastern obstinacy, 293.
Twelvemonths, i.e. a long time, 319.

Under my ribs = In my heart’s core, 339.

Urinal (old French name for phial in which the patient’s water is
sent), 285.

Vocative particles (five in Arabic), 85.

“Wa Kuntu ráihah ursil warák” (the regular Fellah language), 29.
Waddí = Carry, 17.
Wadí’ah = deposit (here sig. blows), 247.
Wafát = death (decease, departure, as opposed to Maut = death),
223.
“Wa há,” etc. (Arab.) corresponding with Syriac “ho” = behold! 275.
Water-closet, Eastern goes to, first thing in the morning, 13.
“We are broken to bits (Kisf.) by our own sin,” 155.
“What hast thou left behind thee, O, Asám”? i.e. What didst thou
see? 297.
What is behind thee? = What is thy news? 44.
What was his affair? = lit. “How was,” etc., 58.
When Fate descended (i.e. When the fated hour came down from
Heaven), 62.
White hand, i.e. gifts and presents, 226.
“Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein,” 119.
Witch, 235.
Women (all of one and the same taste), 96.
“Women are of little wits and lack religion,” 31.
Yá omitted (in poetical fashion) to show speaker’s emotion, 149.
Yá Abá Sábir = O Abu Sabir, 85.
Yá Bilál = O generosity, 40.
Yá Hájjah (pron. Hággeh) = O Pilgrimess, 198.
Yá Kabírí = mon brave, my good man (tr. “my chief”), 12.
Yá Khálati = O my mother’s sister (tr. “O naunty mine”), 32.
Yá Madyúbah = O indebted one, 249.
Yá Nakbah = O calamity, 24.
Yá ’llah jári, yá walad = “Be off at once, boy,” 9.
Yá ’llah, yá ’lláh = Allah and again by Allah (vulg. used for “Look
sharp!”), 9.
Yáhyà, father of Ja’afar, made Wazir by Al-Rashid, 166.
Yamámah-land, 43.
Yar’ad = trembleth (also thundereth), 166.
“Yaskut min ’Aynayh” lit. = fall from his two eyes, lose favour (tr.
“lose regard with him”), 77.

Za’íf = impotent, 217.

Zakát wa Sadakát = lit. paying of poor rate and purifying thy
property by alms deeds (tr. “goodness and beneficence and charity
and almsdoing,”) 346.
Za’mú = they tell, 51.
Zalábiyah = a pancake, 33.
Zird-Khánah = armoury, 327.
Zor-Khán = Lord Violence, 94.
Zubaydah’s tomb, 15.
Zúshád (a fancy name) “Zawash” in Persian = Ζεὺς, 89.
 1. Arab. “Al-Náim wa al-Yakzán.” This excellent story is not in the Mac. or Bresl.
Edits.; but is given in the Breslau Text, iv. 134–189 (Nights cclxxii.-ccxci). It
is familiar to readers of the old “Arabian Nights Entertainments” as “Abou-
Hassan or the Sleeper Awakened;” and as yet it is the only one of the eleven
added by Galland whose original has been discovered in Arabic: the learned
Frenchman, however, supplied it with embellishments more suo, and seems
to have taken it from an original fuller than our text as is shown by sundry
poetical and other passages which he apparently did not invent. Lane (vol. ii.
chap. 12.), noting that its chief and best portion is an historical anecdote
related as a fact, is inclined to think that it is not a genuine tale of The
Nights. He finds it in Al-Ishákí who finished his history about the close of
Sultan Mustafá the Osmanli’s reign, circa A.H. 1032 (= 1623) and he avails
himself of this version as it is “narrated in a simple and agreeable manner.”
Mr. Payne remarks, “The above title (Asleep and Awake) is of course
intended to mark the contrast between the everyday (or waking) hours of
Aboulhusn and his fantastic life in the Khalif’s palace, supposed by him to
have passed in a dream;” I may add that amongst frolicsome Eastern
despots the adventure might often have happened and that it might have
given a hint to Cervantes.

2. i.e. The Wag. See vol. i. 311: the old version calls him “the Debauchee.”

3. Arab. “Al-Fárs”; a people famed for cleverness and debauchery. I cannot see
why Lane omitted the Persians, unless he had Persian friends at Cairo.

4. i.e. the half he intended for spending-money.

5. i.e. “men,” a characteristic Arab idiom: here it applies to the sons of all time.

6. i.e. make much of thee.

7. In Lane the Caliph is accompanied by “certain of his domestics.”

8. Arab. “Khubz Mutabbak,” = bread baked in a platter, instead of in an oven,

an earthen jar previously heated, to the sides of which the scones or
bannocks of dough are applied: “it is lighter than oven-bread, especially if it
be made thin and leavened.” See Al-Shakúrí, a medical writer quoted by
Dozy.

9. In other parts of The Nights Harun al-Rashid declines wine-drinking.

10. The ’Allámah (doctissimus) Sayce (p. 212, Comparative Philology, London,
Trübner, 1885) goes far back for Khalifah = a deputy, a successor. He begins
 with the Semitic (Hebrew ?) root “Khaliph” = to change, exchange: hence
“Khaleph” = agio. From this the Greeks got their κόλλυβος and Cicero his
“Collybus,” a money-lender.

11. Arab. “Harfúsh,” (in Bresl. Edit. iv. 138, “Kharfúsh”), in popular parlance a
“blackguard.” I have to thank Mr. Alexander J. Cotheal, of New York, for
sending me a MS. copy of this tale.

12. Arab. “Ta’ám,” in Egypt and Somaliland = millet seed (Holcus Sorghum)
cooked in various ways. In Barbary it is applied to the local staff of life,
Kuskusú, wheaten or other flour damped and granulated by hand to the size
of peppercorns, and lastly steamed (as we steam potatoes), the cullender-
pot being placed over a long-necked jar full of boiling water. It is served with
clarified butter, shredded onions and meat; and it represents the Risotto of
Northern Italy. Europeans generally find it too greasy for digestion. This
Barbary staff of life is of old date and is thus mentioned by Leo Africanus in
early sixth century. “It is made of a lump of Dow, first set upon the fire, in a
vessel full of holes and afterwards tempered with Butter and Pottage.” So
says good Master John Pory, “A Geographical Historie of Africa, by John Leo,
a Moor,” London, 1600, impensis George Bishop.

13. Arab. “Bi al-Salám” (pron. “Bissalám”) = in the Peace (of Allah).

14. And would bring him bad luck if allowed to go without paying.

15. i.e. of the first half, as has been shown.

16. Arab. “Kumájah” from the Persian Kumásh = bread unleavened and baked in
ashes. Egyptians use the word for bannocks of fine flour.

17. Arab. “Kalí,” our “alcali”: for this and other abstergents see vol. i. 279.

18. These lines have occurred twice in vol. i. 117 (Night xii.); I quote Mr. Payne.

19. Arab. “Yá ’llah, yá ’lláh;” vulg. used for “Look sharp!” e.g. “Yá ’llah járí, yá
walad” = “Be off at once, boy.”

20. Arab. “Banj akrítashí,” a term which has occurred before.

21. A natural clock, called by West Africans Cokkerapeek = Cock-speak. All the
world over it is the subject of superstition: see Giles’s “Strange Stories from a
Chinese Studio” (i. 177), where Miss Li, who is a devil, hears the cock crow
and vanishes.
22. In Lane Al-Rashid “found at the door his young men waiting for him and
ordered them to convey Abu-l-Hasan upon a mule and returned to the
palace; Abu-l-Hasan being intoxicated and insensible. And when the
Khaleefeh had rested himself in the palace, he called for,” etc.

23. Arab. “Kursi,” Assyrian “Kussú” = throne; and “Korsáí” in Aramaic (or
Nabathean as Al-Mas’udi calls it), the second growth-period of the “Semitic”
family, which supplanted Assyrian and Babylonian, and became, as Arabic
now is, the common speech of the “Semitic” world.

24. Arab. “Makán mahjúb,” which Lane renders by “a private closet,” and Payne
by a “privy place,” suggesting that the Caliph slept in a numéro cent. So,
when starting for the “Trakki Campaign,” Sir Charles Napier (of Sind), in his
zeal for lightening officers’ baggage, inadvertently chose a water-closet tent
for his head-quarters—magno cum risu not of the staff, who had a strange
fear of him, but of the multitude who had not.

25. Arab. “Dar al-Salam,” one of the seven “Gardens” into which the
Mohammedan Paradise is divided. Man’s fabled happiness began in a Garden
(Eden) and the suggestion came naturally that it would continue there. For
the seven Heavens, see vol. viii., 111.

26. Branch of Pearl, see vol. ii. 57.

27. Arab. “Kahbah,” the lowest word (vol. i. 70), effectively used in contrast with
the speaker’s surroundings.

28. Arab. “Yá kabírí,” = mon brave, my good man.

29. This exaggeration has now become familiar to English speech.

30. Like an Eastern he goes to the water-closet the first thing in the morning, or
rather dawn, and then washes ceremonially before saying the first prayer. In
Europe he would probably wait till after breakfast. See vol. iii. 242.

31. I have explained why an Eastern does not wash in the basin as Europeans
do in vol. i. p. 241.

32. i.e. He was so confused that he forgot. All Moslems know how to pray,
whether they pray or not.

33. The dawn-prayer consists of only four inclinations (raka’át); two “Farz”
(divinely appointed), and two Sunnah (the custom of the Apostle). For the
Raka’áh see Lane, M.E. chapt. iii.; it cannot be explained without
illustrations.
34. After both sets of prayers, Farz and Sunnah, the Moslem looks over his right
shoulder and says “The Peace (of Allah) be upon you and the ruth of Allah,”
and repeats the words over the left shoulder. The salutation is addressed to
the Guardian Angels or to the bystanders (Moslems) who, however, do not
return it.

35. i.e. Ibrahim of Mosul the musician. See vol. iv. 108.

36. Arab. “Líyúth” plur. of “Layth,” a lion: here warriors are meant.

37. The Abbasides traced their descent from Al-Abbas, Mohammed’s uncle, and
justly held themselves as belonging to the family of the Prophet. See vol. ii.
61.

38. Arab. “Nímshah” = “half-sword.” See vol. ii. p. 193.

39. i.e. May thy dwelling-place never fall into ruin. The prayer has, strange to
say, been granted. “The present city on the Eastern bank of the Tigris was
built by Haroun al-Rashid, and his house still stands there and is an object of
reverent curiosity.” So says my friend Mr. Grattan Geary (vol. i. p. 212,
“Through Asiatic Turkey”, London: Low, 1878). He also gives a sketch of
Zubaydah’s tomb on the western bank of the Tigris near the suburb which
represents old Baghdad: it is a pineapple dome springing from an octagon,
both of brick once revetted with white stucco.

40. In the Bresl. Edit. four hundred. I prefer the exaggerated total.

41. i.e. the raised recess at the upper end of an Oriental saloon, and the place of
honour, which Lane calls by its Egyptian name “Líwán.” See his vol. i. 312
and his M.E. chapt. i: also my vol. iv. p. 71.

42. “Bit o’Musk.”

43. “A gin,” a snare.

44. “A gift,” a present. It is instructive to compare Abu al-Hasan with Sancho

Panza, sprightly Arab wit with grave Spanish humour.

45. i.e. he fell down senseless. The old version has “his head knocked against his
knees.”

46. Arab. “Waddí” vulg. Egyptian and Syrian for the classical “Addí” (ii. of Adú =
preparing to do). No wonder that Lane complains (iii. 376) of the “vulgar
style, abounding in errors.”
47. O Apple, O Repose o’ Hearts, O Musk, O Choice Gift.

48. Arab. “Doghrí,” a pure Turkish word, in Egypt meaning “truly, with truth,”
straightforwardly; in Syria = straight (going), directly.

49. Arab. “Máristán,” see vol. i. 288.

50. The scene is a rechauffé of Badr al-Din Hasan and his wife, i. 247.

51. Arab. “Janzír,” another atrocious vulgarism for “Zanjír,” which, however, has
occurred before.

52. Arab. “Arafshah.”

53. In the “Mishkát al-Masábih” (ii. 341), quoted by Lane, occurs the Hadis,
“Shut your doors anights and when so doing repeat the Basmalah; for the
Devil may not open a door shut in Allah’s name.” A pious Moslem in Egypt
always ejaculates, “In the name of Allah, the Compassionating,” etc., when
he locks a door, covers up bread, doffs his clothes, etc., to keep off devils
and dæmons.

54. An Arab idiom meaning, “I have not found thy good fortune (Ka’b = heel,
glory, prosperity) do me any good.”

55. Arab. “Yá Nakbah” = a calamity to those who have to do with thee!

56. Koran cxii., the “Chapter of Unity.” See vol. iii. 307.

57. See vol. iii. 222.

58. Here the author indubitably speaks for himself, forgetting that he ended
Night cclxxxi. (Bresl. iv. 168), and began that following with Shahrazad’s
usual formula.

59. i.e. “Delight of the vitals” (or heart).

60. The trick is a rechauffé of the trick played on Al-Rashid and Zubaydah.

61. “Kalb” here is not heart, but stomach. The big toes of the Moslem corpse are
still tied in most countries, and in some a sword is placed upon the body; but
I am not aware that a knife and salt (both believed to repel evil spirits) are
so used in Cairo.

62. The Moslem, who may not wear unmixed silk during his lifetime, may be
shrouded in it. I have noted that the “Shukkah,” or piece, averages six feet in
 length.

63. A vulgar ejaculation; the “hour” referring either to birth or to his being made
one of the Caliph’s equerries.

64. Here the story-teller omits to say that Masrúr bore witness to the Caliph’s
statement.

65. Arab. “Wa kuntu ráihah ursil warák,” the regular Fellah language.

66. Arab. “’Irk al-Háshimí.” See vol. ii. 19. Lane remarks, “Whether it was so in
Hashim himself (or only in his descendants), I do not find; but it is
mentioned amongst the characteristics of his great-grandson, the Prophet.”

67. Arab. “Bostán al-Nuzhah,” whose name made the stake appropriate. See vol.
ii. 81.

68. Arab. “Tamásil” = generally carved images, which, amongst Moslems, always
suggest idols and idolatry.

69. The “Shubbák” here would be the “Mashrabiyah,” or latticed balcony,

projecting from the saloon-wall, and containing room for three or more
sitters. It is Lane’s “Meshrebeeyeh,” sketched in M.E. (Introduction) and now
has become familiar to Englishmen.

70. This is to show the cleverness of Abu al-Hasan, who had calculated upon the
difference between Al-Rashid and Zubaydah. Such marvels of perspicacity
are frequent enough in the folk-lore of the Arabs.

71. An artful touch, showing how a tale grows by repetition. In Abu al-Hasan’s
case (infra) the eyes are swollen by the swathes.

72. A Hadis attributed to the Prophet, and very useful to Moslem husbands when
wives differ overmuch with them in opinion.

73. Arab. “Masarat fí-há,” which Lane renders, “And she threw money to her.”

74. A saying common throughout the world, especially when the afflicted widow
intends to marry again at the first opportunity.

75. Arab. “Yá Khálati” = O my mother’s sister; addressed by a woman to an

elderly dame.

76. i.e. That I may put her to shame.

77. Arab. “Zalábiyah.”

78. Arab. “’Alà al-Kaylah,” which Mr. Payne renders by “Siesta-carpet.” Lane reads
“Kiblah” (“in the direction of the Kiblah”) and notes that some Moslems turn
the corpse’s head towards Meccah and others the right side, including the
face. So the old version reads “feet towards Mecca.” But the preposition “Alà”
requires the former sig.

79. Many places in this text are so faulty that translation is mere guess-work;
e.g. “Bashárah” can hardly be applied to ill-news.

80. i.e. of grief for his loss.

81. Arab. “Tobáni” which Lane renders “two clods.” I have noted that the Tob
(Span. Adobe = At· Tob) is a sunbaked brick. Beating the bosom with such
material is still common amongst Moslem mourners of the lower class and
the hardness of the blow gives the measure of the grief.

82. i.e. of grief for her loss.

83. Arab. “Ihtirák” often used in the metaphorical sense of consuming; torturing.

84. Arab. “Haláwat,” lit. = a sweetmeat, a gratuity, a thank-offering.

85. Bresl. Edit., vol. vi. pp. 182–188, Nights ccccxxxii-ccccxxxiv.

86. “The good Caliph” and the fifth of the Orthodox, the other four being Abu
Bakr, Omar, Osman and Ali; and omitting the eight intervening, Hasan the
grandson of the Prophet included. He was the 13th Caliph and 8th Ommiade
A.H. 99–101 (= 717–720) and after a reign of three years he was poisoned
by his kinsmen of the Banu Umayyah who hated him for his piety, asceticism,
and severity in making them disgorge their ill-gotten gains. Moslem
historians are unanimous in his praise. Europeans find him an anachorète
couronné, à froide et respectable figure, who lacked the diplomacy of
Mu’awiyah and the energy of Al-Hajjáj. His principal imitator was Al-Muhtadi
bi’lláh, who longed for a return to the rare old days of Al-Islam.

87. Omar ’Adi bin Artah; governor of Kufah and Basrah under “the good Caliph.”

88. Jarír al-Khatafah, one of the most famous of the “Islámí” poets, i.e., those
who wrote in the first century (A.H.) before the corruption of language
began. (See Terminal Essay, p. 267.) Ibn Khallikan notices him at full length
i. 294.
89. Arab. “Bákiyah,” which may also mean eternal as opposed to “Fániyah” =
temporal. Omar’s answer shows all the narrow-minded fanaticism which
distinguished the early Moslems: they were puritanical as any Praise-God-
Barebones, and they hated “boetry and bainting” as hotly as any
Hanoverian.

90. The Saturday Review (Jan. 2, ’86), which has honoured me by the normal
reviling in the shape of a critique upon my two first vols., complains of the
“Curious word Abhak” as “a perfectly arbitrary and unusual group of Latin
letters.” May I ask Aristarchus how he would render “Sal’am,” (vol. ii. 24),
which apparently he would confine to “Arabic MSS.” (!). Or would he prefer
to A(llah) b(less) h(im) a(nd) k(eep) “W. G. B.” (whom God bless) as
proposed by the editor of Ockley? But where would be the poor old
“Saturnine” if obliged to do better than the authors it abuses?

91. He might have said “by more than one, including the great Labíd.”

92. Fí-hi either “in him” (Mohammed) or “in it” (his action).

93. Chief of the Banu Sulaym. According to Tabari, Abbas bin Mirdas (a well-
known poet), being dissatisfied with the booty allotted to him by the
Prophet, refused it and lampooned Mohammed, who said to Ali, “Cut off this
tongue which attacketh me,” i.e. “Silence him by giving what will satisfy
him.” Thereupon Ali doubled the Satirist’s share.

94. Arab. “Yá Bilál”: Bilal ibn Rabah was the Prophet’s freedman and crier: see
vol. iii. 106. But bilal also signifies “moisture” or “beneficence,” “benefits”: it
may be intended for a double entendre but I prefer the metonymy.

95. The verses of this Kasidah are too full of meaning to be easily translated: it
is fine old poetry.

96. i.e. of the Koraysh tribe. For his disorderly life see Ibn Khallikan ii. 372: he
died however, a holy death, battling against the Infidels in A.H. 93 (= 711–
12), some five years before Omar’s reign.

97. Arab. “Bayn farsi-k wa ’l-damí” = lit. between fæces and menses, i.e. the
foulest part of his mistress’s person. It is not often that The Nights are
“nasty”; but here is a case. See vol. v. 162.

98. “Jamíl the Poet,” and lover of Buthaynah: see vol. ii. 102, Ibn Khallikan (i.
331), and Al-Mas’udi vi. 381, who quotes him copiously. He died A.H. 82 (=
701), or sixteen years before Omar’s reign.
 99. Arab. “Safíh” = the slab over the grave.

100.
A contemporary and friend of Jamíl and the famous lover of Azzah: See vol.
ii. 102, and Al-Mas’udi, vi. 426. The word “Kuthayyir” means “the dwarf.”
Term. Essay, 268.

101.
i.e. in the attitude of prayer.

102.
In Bresl. Edit. “Al-Akhwass,” clerical error noticed in Ibn Khallikan i. 526. His
satires banished him to Dahlak Island in the Red Sea, and he died A.H. 179
(= 795–6).

103.
Another famous poet Abú Firás Hammám or Humaym (dimin. form), as
debauched as Jarir, who died forty days before him in A.H. 110 (= 728–29),
at Basrah. Cf. Term. Essay, 269.

104.
A famous Christian poet. See C. de Perceval, Journ. Asiat. April, 1834, Ibn
Khallikan iii. 136, and Term. Essay, 269.

105.
The poet means that unlike other fasters he eats meat openly. See
Pilgrimage (i. 110), for the popular hypocrisy.

106.
Arab. “Bathá” the lowlands and plains outside the Meccan Valley: See Al-
Mas’udi, vi. 157. Mr. (now Sir) W. Muir in his Life of Mahomet, vol. i., p. ccv.,
remarks upon my Pilgrimage (iii. 252) that in placing Arafat 12 miles from
Meccah, I had given 3 miles to Muna, + 3 to Muzdalifah + 3 to Arafat = 9.
But the total does not include the suburbs of Meccah and the breadth of the
Arafat-Valley.

107. The words of the Azán, vol. i. 306.

108.
Wine in Arabic is feminine, “Shamúl” = liquor hung in the wind to cool, a
favourite Arab practice often noticed by the poets.

109.
i.e. I will fall down dead drunk.
110.
Arab. “Árám,” plur. of Irm, a beautiful girl, a white deer. The word is
connected with the Heb. Reem (Deut. xxxiii. 17), which has been explained
unicorn, rhinoceros, and aurochs. It is the Ass. Rimu, the wild bull of the
mountains, provided with a human face, and placed at the palace-entrance
to frighten away foes, demon or human.

111.
i.e. she who ensnares [all] eyes.

112.
Imam, the spiritual title of the Caliph, as head of the Faith and leader (lit.
“foreman,” Antistes) of the people at prayer. See vol. iv. 111.

113.
For Yamámah see vol. ii. 104. Omar bin Abd al-Aziz was governor of the
province before he came to the Caliphate. To the note on Zarká, the blue-
eyed Yamamite, I may add that Marwan was called Ibn Zarká, son of “la
femme au drapeau bleu,” such being the sign of a public prostitute. Al-
Mas’udi, v. 509.

114.
Rain and bounty, I have said, are synonymous.

115.
About £2 10s.

116.
i.e. what is thy news.

117. Bresl. Edit., vol. vi. pp. 188–9, Night ccccxxxiv.

118.
Of this masterful personage and his énergie indomptable I have spoken in
vol. iv. 3, and other places. I may add that he built Wásit city A.H. 83 and
rendered eminent services to literature and civilization amongst the Arabs.
When the Ommiade Caliph Abd al-Malik was dying he said to his son Walid,
“Look to Al-Hajjaj and honour him for, verily, he it is who hath covered for
you the pulpits; and he is thy sword and thy right hand against all
opponents; thou needest him more than he needeth thee and when I die
summon the folk to the covenant of allegiance; and he who saith with his
head—thus, say thou with thy sword—thus” (Al-Siyuti, p. 225) yet the
historian simply observes, “the Lord curse him.”
119.
i.e. given through his lieutenant.

120.
“Necks” per synecdochen for heads. The passage is a description of a
barber-surgeon in a series of double-entendres; the “nose-pierced”
(Makhzúm) is the subject who is led by the nose like a camel with halter and
ring and the “breaker” (háshim) may be a breaker of bread as the word
originally meant, or breaker of bones. Lastly the “wealth” (mál) is a recondite
allusion to the hair.

121.
Arab. “Kadr” which a change of vowel makes “Kidr” = a cooking-pot. The
description is that of an itinerant seller of boiled beans (Fúl mudammas) still
common in Cairo. The “light of his fire” suggests à double-entendre some
powerful Chief like masterful King Kulayb. See vol. ii. 77.

122.
Arab. “Al-Sufúf,” either ranks of fighting-men or the rows of threads on a
loom. Here the allusion is to a weaver who levels and corrects his threads
with the wooden spathe and shuttle governing warp and weft and who
makes them stand straight (behave aright). The “stirrup” (rikáb) is the loop
of cord in which the weaver’s foot rests.

123.
“Adab.” See vols. i. 132, and ix. 41.

124.
Bresl. Edit., vol. vi. pp. 189–191, Night ccccxxxiv.

125.
Arab. “Za’mú,” a word little used in the Cal., Mac. or Bul. Edit.; or in the
Wortley Montague MS.; but very common in the Bresl. text.

126.
More double-entendres. “Thou hast done justice” (’adalta) also means “Thou
hast swerved from right;” and “Thou hast wrought equitably” (Akasta iv. of
Kast) = “Thou hast transgressed.”

127. Koran vi. 44. Allah is threatening unbelievers, “And when they had forgotten
their warnings We set open to them the gates of all things, until, when they
were gladdened,” etc.
128.
Arab. “Ta’dilú” also meaning, “Ye do injustice”: quoted from Koran iv. 134.

129.
Arab. “Al-Kásitúna” before explained. Koran lxxii. 15.

130.
Bresl. Edit. vol. vi. pp. 191–343, Nights ccccxxxv-cccclxxxvii. This is the old
Persian Bakhtyár Námeh, i.e. the Book of Bakhtyar, so called from the prince
and hero “Fortune’s Friend.” In the tale of Jili’ad and Shimas the number of
Wazirs is seven, as usual in the Sindibad cycle. Here we have the full tale as
advised by the Imám al-Jara’í: “it is meet for a man before entering upon
important undertakings to consult ten intelligent friends; if he have only five
to apply twice to each; if only one, ten times at different visits, and if none,
let him repair to his wife and consult her; and whatever she advises him to
do let him do the clear contrary,” (quoting Omar) or as says Tommy Moore,
Whene’er you’re in doubt, said a sage I once knew,
’Twixt two lines of conduct which course to pursue,
Ask a woman’s advice, and whate’er she advise
Do the very reverse, and you’re sure to be wise.

The Romance of the Ten Wazirs occurs in dislocated shape in the “Nouveaux
Contes Arabes, ou Supplément aux Mille et une Nuits, etc., par M. l’Abbé
* * * Paris, 1788.” It is the “Story of Bohetzad (Bakht-zád = Luck-born, v.p.),
and his Ten Viziers,” in vol. iii., pp. 2–30 of the “Arabian Tales,” etc.,
published by Dom Chavis and M. Cazotte, in 1785; a copy of the English
translation by Robert Heron, Edinburgh, 1792, I owe to the kindness of Mr.
Leonard Smithers of Sheffield. It appears also in vol. viii. of M. C. de
Perceval’s Edition of The Nights; in Gauttier’s Edition (vol. vi.), and as the
“Historia Decem Vizirorum et filii Regis Azad-bacht,” text and translation by
Gustav Knös, of Goettingen (1807). For the Turkish, Malay and other
versions see (p. xxxviii. etc.) “The Bakhtiyār Nāma,” etc. Edited (from the Sir
William Ouseley’s version of 1801) by Mr. W. A. Clouston and privately
printed, London, 1883. The notes are valuable but their worth is sadly
injured by the want of an index. I am pleased to see that Mr. E. J. W. Gibb is
publishing the “History of the Forty Vezirs; or, the Story of the Forty Morns
and Eves,” written in Turkish by “Sheykh-Zadah,” evidently a nom de plume
(for Ahmad al-Misri?), and translated from an Arabic MS. which probably
dated about the xvth century.

131.
In Chavis and Cazotte, the “kingdom of Dineroux (comprehending all Syria
and the isles of the Indian Ocean) whose capital was Issessara.” An article in
 the Edinburgh Review (July, 1886), calls the “Supplement” a “bare-faced
forgery;” but evidently the writer should have “read up” his subject before
writing.

132.
The Persian form; in Arab. Sijistán, the classical Drangiana or province East
of Fars = Persia proper. It is famed in legend as the feof of hero Rustam.

133.
Arab. Ráwi = a professional tale-teller, which Mr. Payne justly holds to be a
clerical error for “Ráí, a beholder, one who seeth.”

134.
In Persian the name would be Bahr-i-Jaur = “luck” (or fortune, “bahr”) of
Jaur-(or Júr-) city.

135.
Supply “and cared naught for his kingdom.”

136.
Arab. “Atráf,” plur. of “Tarf,” a great and liberal lord.

137. Lit. “How was,” etc. Kayf is a favourite word not only in the Bresl. Edit., but
throughout Egypt and Syria. Classically we should write “Má;” vulgarly
“Aysh.”

138.
Karmania vulg. and fancifully derived from Kirmán Pers. = worms because
the silkworm is supposed to have been bred there; but the name is of far
older date as we find the Asiatic Æthiopians of Herodotus (iii. 93) lying
between the Germanii (Karman) and the Indus. Also Karmanía appears in
Strabo and Sinus Carmanicus in other classics.

139.
Arab. “Ka’íd” lit. = one who sits with, a colleague, hence the Span. Alcayde;
in Marocco it is = colonel, and is prefixed e.g. Ka’íd Maclean.

140.
A favourite food; Al-Hariri calls the dates and cream, which were sold
together in bazars, the “Proud Rider on the desired Steed.”

141.
In Bresl. Edit. vi. 198 by misprint “Kutrú:” Chavis and Cazotte have
“Kassera.” In the story of Bihkard we find a P.N. “Yatrú.”
142.
i.e. waylaying travellers, a term which has often occurred.

143.
i.e. the royal favour.

144.
i.e. When the fated hour came down (from Heaven).

145.
As the Nights have proved in many places, the Asl (origin) of a man is
popularly held to influence his conduct throughout life. So the Jeweller’s wife
(vol. ix.) was of servile birth, which accounted for her vile conduct; and
reference is hardly necessary to a host of other instances. We can trace the
same idea in the sayings and folk-lore of the West, e.g. Bon sang ne peut
mentir, etc., etc.

146.
i.e. “What deemest thou he hath done?”

147. The apodosis wanting “to make thee trust in him?”

148.
In the Braj Bákhá dialect of Hindi, we find quoted in the Akhlák-i-Hindi, “Tale
of the old Tiger and the Traveller”:—
Jo jáko paryo subháo jáe ná jío-sun;
Ním na mitho hoe sichh gur ghio sun.

Ne’er shall his nature fail a man whate’er that nature be,
The Ním-tree bitter shall remain though drenched with Gur and Ghí.

The Ním (Melia Azadirachta) is the “Persian lilac,” whose leaves, intensely
bitter, are used as a preventive to poison: Gur is the Anglo-Indian Jaggeri =
raw sugar and Ghi = clarified butter. Roebuck gives the same proverb in
Hindostani.

149.
In Chavis and Cazotte “Story of Kaskas; or the Obstinate Man.” For ill-luck,
see Miss Frere’s “Old Deccan Days” (p. 171), and Giles’s “Strange Stories,”
&c. (p. 430), where the young lady says to Ma, “You often asked me for
money; but on account of your weak luck I hitherto refrained from giving it.”
150.
True to life in the present day, as many a standing hay-rick has shown.

151.
The “Munajjim” is a recognised authority in Egyptian townlets, and in the
village-republics of Southern India the “Jyoshi” is one of the paid officials.

152.
Arab. “Amín” sub. and adj. In India it means a Government employé who
collects revenue; in Marocco a commissioner sent by His Sharifian Majesty.

153.
Our older word for divers = Arab. “Ghawwásún”: a single pearl (in the text
Jauhar = the Port. Aljofar) is called “habbah” = grain or seed.

154.
The kindly and generous deed of one Moslem to another, and by no means
rare in real life.

155.
“Eunuch,” etymologically meaning chamberlain (εὐνὴ + ἔχειν), a bed-
chamberservant or slave, was presently confined to castrated men found
useful for special purposes, like gelded horses, hounds, and cockerels turned
to capons. Some writers hold that the creation of the semivir or apocopus
began as a punishment in Egypt and elsewhere; and so under the Romans
amputation of the “peccant part” was frequent: others trace the Greek
“invalid,” i.e., impotent man, to marital jealousy, and not a few to the wife
who wished to use the sexless for hard work in the house without danger to
the slave-girls. The origin of the mutilation is referred by Ammianus
Marcellinus (lib. iv., chap. 17), and the Classics generally, to Semiramis, an
“ancient queen” of decidedly doubtful epoch, who thus prevented the
propagation of weaklings. But in Genesis (xxxvii. 36; xxxix. 1, margin) we
find Potiphar termed a “Sarím” (castrato), an “attenuating circumstance” for
Mrs. P. Herodotus (iii. chap. 48) tells us that Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent
three hundred Corcyrean boys to Alyattes for castration ἐπὶ ῇτ ἐκτομῇ, and
that Panionios of Chios sold caponised lads for high prices, (viii. 105): he
notices (viii. 104 and other places) that eunuchs “of the Sun, of Heaven, of
the hand of God,” were looked upon as honourable men amongst the
Persians whom Stephanus and Brissonius charge with having invented the
name (Dabistan i. 171). Ctesias also declares that the Persian kings were
under the influence of eunuchs. In the debauched ages of Rome the women
found a new use for these effeminates, who had lost only the testes or
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