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For decades, Arab and Western scholars have wondered about a possible genealogical relationship between the European sonnet and earlier Arabic poetic forms such as the muwashshah form popular in Muslim Spain. Published in 2011, Kamal Abu-Deeb's Arabic translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets not only offered a well-received complete translation of the sonnets; it also proposed a bold theory of how exactly this genealogical link might have worked. In the section of his introduction excerpted here, which he has rewritten in English (with a special English epilogue) for this issue at our request, Abu-Deeb lays out an argument that the polyglot Sicilian court of Frederick II (1194-1250) was the forum in which poet Giacomo da Lentini, father of the Italian sonnet, might have heard, adopted and adapted Arabic poetry of muwashshah type. Abu-Deeb also discusses what he calls his 'fantasy' of an Arab origin for Shakespeare's name. We present this valuable document to you as Abu-Deeb wrote it, with minimal editorial alterations. -Eds.
Keywords: Frederick II, Giacomo da Lentini, Ibn Hamdis al-Siqilli, Ibn Sahl al-Ishbili, Ibn Sana' al-Mulk, muwashshah, Petrarchan sonnet, Shakespearean sonnet
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Epilogue (For the English Version of the Study)
Sometime in the mid-1980s, I was working on a paper to be delivered at an international conference on the impact of Arabic literature on Western literatures. As I explored various possibilities, familiar and obscure, a phantom of an idea began to loom in my head: why is the structure of the sonnet so similar to the structure of the muwashshah in Arabic, yet the muwashshah has countless variations of structure and the sonnet has had (until recently) limited variations? And why is English poetry so relaxed about breaking rules of prosody and yet so tightly rigid about the rules that govern the structure of the sonnet, especially in Shakespeare's time?
These initial questions never had the chance to be investigated in my own work, for reasons that are not relevant to the issue. Then, in the period around 2006, I was playing around with the structure of the sonnet and found myself almost forced to write one. I did.
To my surprise, however, the writing did not stop when I composed the cap, as it has been called...