Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Foreword by Professor Clive Holes
- Introduction
- The Transcription of Both Classical and Colloquial Arabic
- Part 1 Fact Finding
- Part 2 Single or Related Items
- 5 The Prophet‘s Shirt: Three Versions of an Egyptian Narrative Ballad Journal of Semitic Studies, 26, 1 (1981)
- 6 An Uncommon Use of Nonsense Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 14 (1983)
- 7 An Early Example of Narrative Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 21, 2 (September 1990)
- 8 An Incomplete Egyptian Ballad on the 1956 War Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature, ed. J. R. Smart (Richmond, 1996)
- 9 An Honour Crime with a Difference first published as ‘Three Versions of an Egyptian Narrative Ballad’, Proceedings of First International Conference on Middle Eastern Popular Culture, Magdalen College, Oxford (17–21 September 2000)
- 10 Pulp Stories in the Repertoire of Egyptian Folk Singers British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 33, 2 (November 2006)
- 11 Karam il-Yatīm: A Translation of an Egyptian Folk Ballad Journal of Arabic Literature, 23, 2 (July 1992)
- 12 Of Loose Verse and Masculine Beauty Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Nuova serie, 2 (2007)
- 13 A Zajal on the Mi
Oriente Moderno, 89, 2 (2009) - Part 3 Cultural and Social Implications
12 - Of Loose Verse and Masculine Beauty Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Nuova serie, 2 (2007)
from Part 2 - Single or Related Items
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Foreword by Professor Clive Holes
- Introduction
- The Transcription of Both Classical and Colloquial Arabic
- Part 1 Fact Finding
- Part 2 Single or Related Items
- 5 The Prophet‘s Shirt: Three Versions of an Egyptian Narrative Ballad Journal of Semitic Studies, 26, 1 (1981)
- 6 An Uncommon Use of Nonsense Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 14 (1983)
- 7 An Early Example of Narrative Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 21, 2 (September 1990)
- 8 An Incomplete Egyptian Ballad on the 1956 War Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature, ed. J. R. Smart (Richmond, 1996)
- 9 An Honour Crime with a Difference first published as ‘Three Versions of an Egyptian Narrative Ballad’, Proceedings of First International Conference on Middle Eastern Popular Culture, Magdalen College, Oxford (17–21 September 2000)
- 10 Pulp Stories in the Repertoire of Egyptian Folk Singers British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 33, 2 (November 2006)
- 11 Karam il-Yatīm: A Translation of an Egyptian Folk Ballad Journal of Arabic Literature, 23, 2 (July 1992)
- 12 Of Loose Verse and Masculine Beauty Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Nuova serie, 2 (2007)
- 13 A Zajal on the MiOriente Moderno, 89, 2 (2009)
- Part 3 Cultural and Social Implications
Summary
There are many verse forms to which the Egyptian folk singer may resort for narrative purposes. The most demanding is the mawwāl, with its set rhyming patterns and elaborate punning rhymes. At the other extreme is the singing to a repetitive tune of mono-rhyme stanzas usually consisting of three lines, but sometimes stretched to four or five if the performer needs space to round off the information he wants to convey. Each of these stanzas is then followed by a refrain in which the accompanists usually join the soloist.
A slight elaboration of this strophic arrangement is the expansion of the tercets by the addition of a fourth line with a distinctive rhyme shared by the closing line of what are now quatrains, so that the arrangement may be represented as:
bbbA cccA dddA … zzzA
Such a song may (but need not) also have a refrain that shares the binding rhyme.
The resulting pattern is one often encountered in the Andalusian zajal, or even earlier in the musammaṭ with which >Abū-Nuwās (d. 813) and some of his contemporaries experimented and of which the murabba< version has the same rhyme scheme, now a favourite in a great variety of songs.
Yet the trend appears to be for the leading or most ambitious folk singers to turn increasingly to the mawwāl with its elaborate rhyme schemes, and their taste for zahr is such that some try to expand every rhyme to a multi-syllabic paronomasia achieved by distortion of the normal pronunciation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Exploring Arab Folk Literature , pp. 140 - 146Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011