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The contents of the future are the contents of a cloud.So begins translator David Larsen’s introduction for the
Book of Rain, the earliest known catalogue of Arabic weather-words, by early Arabic linguist Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī. In Larsen’s translation, Abū Zayd’s lexicography of rain is simultaneously an academic, archival, and poetic pursuit.
After the fashion of Larsen’s award-winning translation of
Names of the Lion, these rich, extensive lists provide detailed descriptions of specific kinds of rainfall, including
al-tahtān, or “The Outpour,” a kind of continual rain, or
al-waṭfā’, or “The Beetle-Brow” which is a “briskly-flowing rain that is counted among the continual rains, whether it is of long or short falling.” Here, we are provided language 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 will continue to fascinate readers for centuries to come.
List of contents
ContentsAbbreviations and Symbols
Translator’s Introduction
Folio 1v of BnF MS 4231 Arabe
(Incipit of the Book of Rain)
The Book of Rain
Asterisms and Seasons
Names of Rain
Frost and Dew
Dust Clouds
Names of Thunder
Names of Lightning
Names of Clouds
Names of Waters
Folio 14r of BnF MS 4231 Arabe
(Conclusion to the Book of Rain)
Endnotes
Appendix: On the names of the wind by Ibn Khālawayh.
Sources
About the author
David Larsen is a U.S. poet and translator of classical Arabic texts. His translation of Ibn Khālawayh’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 Jamīl Buthaynah. David Larsen lives in New York City.
Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī 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 Abū Zayd have survived to the present day; and of these, his
Book of Rain is the first to be translated into any language. Abū Zayd died in Basra circa 830 CE, at the age of ninety-five.
