At the beginning of a long line of ghazal poets identifiable by one name—before Ghalib, Baki, Kabir, Hafez, Sa‘di and Rumi—there was Jamil (d. 82 A.H. / 701 CE). His forced separation from Buthaynah, and his famous refusal to love anyone else, were the template for the fictional career of Majnun Layla and countless tales of lovers after that, and if these have eclipsed Jamil’s own verse it is a small wonder. How to separate the poet from the legend without killing the romance is the job of Jamil’s editor and translator, who will speak on the sociopoetic context of his corpus in the 7th century, its fortunes in the Abbasid period (during which a diwan of Jamil’s poems was collected and then lost), and its bilingual renewal in the 21st century.

David Larsen (Senior Research Fellow, Library of Arabic Literature) is a US poet and translator, and Clinical Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at NYU. His translation of Ibn Khālawayh’s Names of the Lion received the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.

In Person (NYUAD Campus) and on Zoom

The seminar is open to the NYUAD community and by invitation. Registration has closed.