The Book of Rain - by Abū & Zayd Al-Anṣ & ā & rī (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 Dribble," 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.

Review Quotes

Previous praise for Names of the Lion:

In this remarkable work of translation and discovery David Larsen makes available to us what we can now read as a powerful old/new act of poetic naming. Not composed as poetry in the familiar sense, Ibn Khalawayh's Names of the Lion comes alive today as a further example of Emerson's definition of the poet as "namer and language-maker." Larsen's careful and groundbreaking translation, presented here in its entirety, is well worth a reading and celebration as an instance of pre-modern assemblage brought into the framework of a new poetics.

Jerome Rothenberg

Larsen's lyrical rendering of each name, based on extensive research into its etymological and cultural roots, does justice to its lexicographically-meticulous source, while at the same time creating something entirely new... the Names of the Lion, obsessively enumerated, become a poetic meditation on language's exuberant attempts to convey the ineffable. Yet through its five hundred epithets, the creature itself does begin to take shape and the reader comes face to face with the lion: so glorious in myth, so awful in reality.

Phoebe Carter, Kenyon Review

A fascinating volume. Everything in these pages emerges from the 350 names attributed to the mythologised creature of the lion. Through the careful, obsessively detailed index, and alongside the retelling of Arabic grammarians' arguments, arises a fascinating account of the lavish and important workings of nominal attribution. It's all in a name, all in a grain of sand, all in a snowflake, all in a mane.

Caroline Bergvall

A mystifying and delightful treatise that conveys, as few other texts do, the voluminousness of the classical Arabic language and its poetic resources. Its author was a literary celebrity during a period crowded with savants, and his idiosyncratic genius is on full display in this astonishingly erudite but wonderfully readable book.

Elias Muhanna

A huge piece of labor, and utterly fascinating. . . . If you can, it is well worth getting hold of Wave Books's lovely paperback editions of the Names of the Lion, as an aesthetically beautiful book, an entrancing piece of literature, and an intriguing, even for the non-specialist, work of scholarship.

Arab Lit

As with Gertrude Stein's insight cited elsewhere, a poetry of names emerges, even & sometimes most powerfully in forms & genres not associated with poetry as such...an indication of how far our own practice has come in the extension of what we identify or read as poetry.

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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.