Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn (Banners of the Champions and the Standards of the Distinguished, also translated as Pennants of the Champions) is a thirteenth-century anthology of Arabic Andalucian poetry by Ibn Said al-Maghribi. It is, in the words of Louis Crompton, 'perhaps the most important' of the various medieval Andalucian poetry anthologies. 'His aim in compiling the collection seems to have been to show that poetry produced in the West was as good as anything the East had to offer (and that stuff by Ibn Sa'id and his family was especially good)'. It survives today in only one manuscript.
Contents
Date
The Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn is part of the fifteen-volume al-Mughrib fī ḥulā l-Maghrib ('The Extraordinary Book on the Adornments of the West'), whose compilation Ibn Said completed. But the Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn also circulated separately. Ibn Said compiled Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn in Cairo, completing it on 21 June 1243 (641 by Islamic dating). Its patron and dedicatee was Musā ibn Yaghmūr (1203-65).
Method
Ibn Said wrote that he wished to include only those few fragments "whose idea is more subtle than the West Wind, and whose language is more beautiful than a pretty face." The poetry chosen all in the classical style, following 'all the traditional conventions of ryme, meter, and lexicon' and excluding colloquial verse.
The anthology is arranged according to home and occupation of the writer, proceeding through western, central, and eastern Spain, to Ibiza, North Africa, and then Sicily. It thus covers the whole of the Andalusian world, including Alcalá, Córdoba, Granada, Lisbon, Murcia, Zaragoza, Seville, Toledo, and Valencia. Within each region, the poems are ordered by city, and then by the poet's occupation, from the highest social rank to the lowest. Authors include bureaucrats, gentlemen, kings, ministers, and scholars; the book is evidence of how important love poetry was to the educated of al-Andalus. In all, the anthology contains 314 poetic fragments by 145 identifiable poets; Ibn Said also included a prologue and a short epilogue, along with occasional comments on the texts and brief notes on the poets.
According to A. J. Arberry.
Example
An excerpt from a poem of the Pennants, "The Tailor's Apprentice" by Ibn Kharuf (d. 1205), in Arberry's translation, serves as one example:
His stool, the steed he rides upon
Rejoices in its champion
Armed with the needle that he plies
Sharp as the lashes of his eyes.
The needle o'er the silken dress
Careers with wondrous nimbleness
As down the sky bright meteors snake.
Influence
Gómez's translation greatly influenced modern Spanish poetry, not least Lorca, whose El diván del Tamarit was particularly indebted to the book.
Editions and translations
The work was edited in 1942 by Emilio García Gómez, who also provided a Spanish translation. It was re-edited in 1973 by Numan Abd al-Mutaal al-Qadi.
A selection of its poems was translated into English by A. J. Arberry, making the anthology for decades one of the most available collections of medieval Arabic poetry available in English. Arberry seems to have avoided including poems with particularly explicit sexual (especially homosexual) content, however.
The anthology was subsequently translated into English by James Bellamy and Patricia Steiner.