The Adventures of Antar. An Early Arab Epic - Approaches to Arabic Literature No. 3.

Bleistiftanstreichungen oder -anmerkungen., ansonsten gut und sauber / Pencil marks or annotations, otherwise good and clean - Beilage: Kopie aus Lexikon - INTRODUCTION -- General -- The Arabian romance of the bedouin hero, �Antara ( or �Antar ) ibn Shaddad, has the reputation of being the closest competitor to the One Thousand and One Nights in richness of content and in skill of composition. It surpasses all others in ferocity of martial narrative. The adventure of the pre-Islamic poet �Antara is expanded into an �epic� of an African slave who by his mighty arm became ruler of the world. -- The valour of this knight was once highly praised in Europe. Von Hammer-Pugstall, a Viennese Orientalist, introduced Antar to European readers in 1802. Terrick Hamilton, a servant of the East India Company and later Oriental Secretary to the British Embassy in Constantinople, published a partial translation into English in 1819 and 1820. A series of articles between 1833 and 1847 in the Journal Asiatique recounted episodes from Antar�s tumultuous career. In 1868 Von Hammer-Pugstall saw part of his labour published in Paris as Les Aventures d�Antar. -- Von Hammer-Pugstall�s abridgement was published in Danish in 1871, and a Norwegian, C. A. Holmboe, compared Antar�s exploits to those of Bayard when he penned his views in 1881. However, it was above all in France that the Antar �vogue� reached its peak among men of letters. Lamartine published the 'Pens� d�Antar� in 1849, and in his Vie des grands hommes he described the romance as �un des plus beaux chants lyriques de toutes les langues�. To him Antar was on a par with Homer, Virgil and Tasso, �le David moderne du d�rt�. ISBN 9780856681615