A Note on the Text

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

This edition reprints the English of Reynold A. Nicholson's The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq: A Collection of Mystical Odes by Muhyi'ddín ibn al-'Arabí, published in London by the Royal Asiatic Society in the Oriental Translation Fund, New Series, vol. XX, 1911. The work is in the public domain in the United States, having been published before 1929.

What this edition contains. Nicholson's 1911 volume prints the Arabic text of the odes on pages 10 to 47, followed by his English translation and an abridged rendering of Ibn al-'Arabí's own commentary. This edition presents the English only: his preface, his introduction, the sixty-one odes, the commentary as he abridged it, his footnotes, and his index. The Arabic pages are not reproduced. Readers comparing page counts should know that roughly a quarter of the original volume is Arabic type and is absent here by design.

It is worth stating plainly that the commentary is Nicholson's abridgement of Ibn al-'Arabí's, not the commentary entire. He says so on his own title page.

How the text was established. Two witnesses were used. The first is the 1911 printing itself, in the University of California Libraries copy digitised by the Internet Archive. The second is the transcription published by sacred-texts.com. Where the two disagreed, the 1911 page was treated as authoritative.

That comparison was not a formality. The sacred-texts transcription carries one published erratum for the whole book, and the collation found thirteen further substantive errors in it — words dropped, words inserted, and words replaced by others. Among them: a verse reading "They die; not complain of the anguish of love" where the original reads "They did not complain", which reverses the argument of the poem; "the valley of Mind" for "the valley of Miná"; "O Wu tree" for "O bán tree"; and "a locks of manifestation" for "a locus". Each correction is recorded, with both readings and the leaf of the scan on which the true reading was confirmed.

A further five readings were corrected on grammatical grounds alone, without confirmation from the scan, because the search facility used to consult it returns text in line-length fragments and in these five instances the disputed word fell at a line break. They are marked as editorial emendations in the record rather than as verified corrections.

Verification was not uniform across the book. The earlier odes were compared line by line against both witnesses. From Ode XIII onward the second witness was consulted by targeted query wherever a passage failed to parse, carried a proper name or a citation, or read as a non-sequitur. A dropped word that happens to leave a grammatical sentence could survive that process undetected, and no claim is made that none has.

Arabic in the text. Nicholson set a number of Arabic words and two verse quotations in Arabic type. The transcription from which this text descends replaced them with placeholders, and in one instance dropped a word and its placeholder together, leaving a sentence with no subject. Where his English determines the missing word beyond reasonable doubt, it is supplied in Latin letters, following his own practice elsewhere in the book: he writes shurb and dhawq, and explains that the bán tree suggests bayn, separation, without recourse to Arabic type. Seven words are supplied on that basis.

Where the English does not determine the word but the sense is nonetheless

recoverable, the word has been supplied in Latin letters on editorial judgement.

These are marked in the record as editorial supplies, distinct from those his own

English fixes. They include sukr and riyy, completing the four degrees of

manifestation whose first two he prints himself; wa'd and wa'íd in the

footnote where he glosses them "to promise" and "to threaten"; rawí, the

rhyme-letter, and há, the letter the poet names as the object of the poem;

sáq, from the Koranic verse he cites; Tawrát, in his own etymology of the

word Tora; faná', where he writes of "Nirvana or transcendental

unconsciousness"; and the title of Ibn al-'Arabí's commentary, *Dhakhá'ir

al-A'láq*, which is established in the scholarly literature. Nineteen further

words could not be recovered with any confidence and are left as [Ar.], which

means only that Arabic type stood at that point. The two verse quotations, by

Imru' al-Qays and al-Aswad b. Ya'fur, which Nicholson quotes in Arabic and does

not translate, are marked [Ar. verse]; his attribution and reference are kept

in each case. Nothing has been guessed where guessing would have been visible as

scholarship, and no Arabic script appears in this edition.

Silent changes. Three inconsistent transliterations in the body text were normalised to the spelling used everywhere else in the book, and four verse numbers carrying a comma or colon in place of a full stop were regularised. The title of the Mufaddaliyyát was restored from encoding debris. These are editorial normalisations, not corrections drawn from the original: the digitised scan's optical character recognition does not reliably preserve diacritical points, and cannot settle such questions either way. Nicholson's index uses fuller diacritics than his body text; that distinction is his, and has been left alone.

The index. Nicholson's index is reproduced, with its references re-keyed to this edition so that each is a working link. Entries falling only within the untranslated Arabic pages have been removed, since they would point to material this edition does not contain; twenty-one such references and nine entries were dropped on that ground.

A full record of every correction, every emendation, every supplied word and every normalisation was kept during the preparation of this text.