When ‘The Wine of Life is Drawn’

Translated by James E. Montgomery


Sin

1
Dappled with Moonbeams

It’s March, winter has gone, the trees
   are in bud and Time’s scent is sweet.
   Spring has dressed the earth in a patterned
   gown of flowers whose beauty dazzles
   the eye. Demand justice from Fate
   for its wrongs – Time has laid you low
   for too long. Banish decorum, let’s misbehave
   with a sharp red wine dappled
   with moonbeams, poured from the hand
   of a flirt with the moon for a brow
   and a gold dinar for a face, graced
   with a fawn’s eyes and neck, wearing
   a zunnār to torment me, drunk
   on his glances, while he passes round
   an ancient, virginal vintage from Karkh
   that reluctantly rejects the water’s
   embrace and, like our vital spark, creeps
   through the body in a blend of shame,
   decency, and decorum, in the company
   of brave heroes who, clad in dignity,
   no trace of rudeness, have enslaved Fate.


2
The Swallows

The swallows are back! Let’s have a drink –
   it’s green fields and shade next.
   Their song brings the summer,
   an end to the cold, filling the sky
   with calls like the click of shears
   clipping wool, their nests in the houses
   like lines drawn by a stylus.

The swallows are back, let’s have a drink
   of a precious wine that shoots
   sparks in the cup, guarded
   for seventy long years by a pagan
   who worships her, dusk and dawn.
   After the third cup, the party jabbers
   like rutting camels among the females.


3
The Moon Peeking through the Clouds

The day was cold, the dark refused
   to budge so I mixed a heady wine.
   I lifted my hands, she lit up, frothing
   with lightning bolts. My companion recoiled,
   then, stretching out his hands to find
   warmth in her generous flames, saw his fingers
   turn red without feeling her star bright
   heat. ‘Careful,’ I said, ‘of these thunderbolts
   from under the ruby wine’s niqab. Pour
   a cup and behold pure joy, the night’s
   pelt is still black.’ Gaze averted, he tried
   to look but couldn’t lift his eyes as high
   as her hijab, served by a devoted flirt
   with a reem’s gaze, an oryx’s neck,
   and a backside like a hill. Put his virtue to the test
   and you’ll see all kinds of wondrous beauty.
   We bent our heads to resist his looks,
   trying not to stare. His name is eloquent
   and stylish, a stroke of genius you won’t find
   in the Holy Book, a perfect match
   for those who speak to him – he’s called
   ‘Plague’, and that’s no mistake, for he infects
   me with his face, round and limpid
   like the moon peeking through the clouds.


4
A Bonfire’s Flames

A caravan lost its way
   in the gloomy night.
   They heard our drunken
   songs and saw our wine
   illuminated from afar
   like a bonfire’s flames.
   With each sip we took,
   they stopped in their tracks
   but when we mixed the wine,
   they geed up their camels.


5
A Phoenix

Wine and water are foes – at his touch she flies
   into a rage, her eye-like bubbles white, eggs
   on the goblet’s rim, though she’s not sick, so ethereal
   we imagine she’s a phoenix pulling against her reins,
   building a heaven suspended over the earth, crimson
   like a blood clot inside an egg, with white stars
   on her blood-red surface, lifted by air above the goblet’s
   twinkling stars. Such majesty defies our imagination –
   we fail to find names to describe her and try
   to divide her attributes according to our fancy,
   just as opinions and views divide religions.
   She’s poured from the hand of a sweet-natured flirt
   who looks like a girl. I weep for her loss – no poet’s
   tears over ruins in a desert have ever made me cry.


6
Give Me to the Arabs

You’re offering a dower for the scarlet wine –
   what you’ll gain is her full weight in gold.
   Your suit undervalues her worth, so beware
   lest she hear you and the vines swear to bear
   no more grapes.
                                    At the sight of her, I offered a heap
   of pearls and unbored rubies, but she was shy
   and cried in the amphora, ‘How could you, mother?
   I’m scared of fire and flames.’ ‘Have no fear,
   I’ll never expose you to this,’ I said. ‘And the sun?’
   ‘The heat has passed.’ ‘Who asks for my hand?’
   ‘I do.’ ‘My husband?’ ‘Only sweet water.’
   ‘Impregnation?’ ‘With the coldest ice there is.’
   ‘My home? I don’t like wood.’ ‘Glass beakers
   and tumblers made by Pharaoh.’ ‘How excited
   you’ve made me. Don’t give me to an oaf
   or a boor who frowns when he sniffs me,
   to a fire-worshipper, a Jew, or a follower
   of the cross, to a miser impervious to insult,
   an uncultured man, or a ruffian who won’t protect
   me from fools. Give me to the Arabs to drink!’
   ‘Wine, you’re forbidden to all but the wealthy
   who’ve spent on you all their land and property!’


7
A Holy Sacrifice

When War deploys his cavalry for battle
   and Death’s banner has given the signal
   in front of Iblis, when the fires of conflict
   burst into flames, we clash in pleasure
   with our lovers. When combat bites, baring
   its teeth in a grimace, we use our hands
   as bows and lilies as arrows, our weapons
   sprigs of basil not standards and spears.
   War becomes peace and we’re allies
   once again of heroes who deem death
   from pleasure a holy sacrifice. We strum the lute
   to the beat of their drum, with a rainbow
   of gillyflowers for cavalry and Lebanese apples
   as stones for our trebuchets. The conflict’s cause
   is a saqi who has taken the wine prisoner
   and passes her around, urging us to drain
   our glasses so the last can overtake the first.
   Some lie flat on the ground, others drunk
   and bloated. Our war doesn’t engulf
   people in hostility – we kill with the wine
   and use her to resurrect our victims.


8
A Whispered Prayer

An ancient wine, firing sparks when stirred
   in the cup, like a blazing star or the full moon
   illuminating the gloom, so bright she dispels
   the black night, filling her drinkers with joy,
   all cares banished, her smile revealing pearls
   set in a necklace crafted by water’s touch.
   I always taste her with a whispered prayer.


9
Bury Me by the Vine

My critics urge me to commit heresy, a sin
   I’m incapable of. They want me to stop drinking wine
   because on Judgment Day it imposes a crushing debt
   on its drinkers. Their attacks only make me more devout –
   I am her champion for as long as I live. Am I to reject
   her when God has not rejected her name and the caliph
   is her friend? She’s the sun, but unlike the sun,
   she’s not on fire and always shines brighter. Here on earth
   we may not live in Paradise, but her nectar is our ally
   against Time. Until I die, I’ll stay true to her whose soul
   I share. So, my critics, pour me a drink and sing me this song,
   ‘Bury me by the vine whose roots will water my dead bones.’


Sorrow

10
Jonah inside the Fish

With bright-faced heroes, like lamps in the murk, proud-
   nosed, stiff-necked, keen as burnished blades,
   who attacked Fate with pleasure, their true love
   whose ties they never cut, living under Time’s
   lucky stars and in its tender embrace, I drank
   a sharp Isfant wine, pure and clear, chilled
   in the north wind, imported from Takrīt, the kind
   of bride whose hand we were quick to order
   when, on a night like a dark army roiling like a sea’s
   storm-tossed waves where sailors lose their minds
   in fear, we’d rouse the women who own the taverns.
   A grey-haired heathen appeared, dressed like a pious
   God-fearer, descended from infidels, monastic idol-
   worshippers. ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘You know
   who. We’re all big-spenders, generous to a fault.
   We’ve stopped at your house on our travels. Name
   your price and rob us of our money, for tonight’s
   your lucky night, provided you despoil us as David
   did Goliath. So come on, do us a favour and make a profit,
   at least until we leave, then you can die for all we care.’
   ‘I have what you want but wait until the morning.’ ‘No!
   Bring her now!’ The wine is the dawn, her clear radiance
   dispelling the gloom when she shoots ruby-red sparks
   like night stars fired by patrolling angels at rebel
   afreets. In the cup, poured from an upturned jar
   bleeding at the mouth, she advanced like the sun
   at daybreak. ‘How long has she been veiled in the jar?’
   we asked. ‘She was made in the time of Saul, concealed
   in her amphora, now an old spinster buried in her coffin
   in the ground. She’s been brought to you from the depths
   where she rested, so I’d avoid drinking her with food.’
   On the nose, she offered a heady smell like the scent
   of musk crumbled from a shrew’s pouch when cut,
   and when mixed with fresh rainwater was like a network
   of pearls on ruby brocade. She was passed around by a moon-
   faced lad with lustrous, dark eyes, as if they were the source
   of Hārūt’s magic, to the strumming of a lute by a singer
   who drove us to ecstasy with his song, ‘Hail, Hind’s
   home in Dhāt al-Jiz‘!’ We looked as if that cultured
   performer from Hīt had cast a spell on us, unable
   to tear our eyes away from his graceful form.
   I joked and said, ‘Hit it, Hītī!’ In time to the beat,
   he began to sing well-worked phrases of supreme
   eloquence and when the drums and the stringed lute,
   round like a sphere, caused our heads to spin,
   we were left as if in a trance, exulting in the wine in gardens
   thick with myrtle, acacia, pomegranate, and mulberry,
   where the birds distracted us from all delights with their chorus
   of calls.
                     Blessed be that wondrous era, so loved
   by me, so quickly slipped away – love never distracted
   me from indulging in wine and answering her calls
   until I was shocked to see my hair turn grey. How cursed
   is its appearance, hated by beautiful women who end
   their love affairs and cut you off at its first sight.
   Now I regret my mistakes and the prayers I’ve missed –
   Lord, forgive me as you forgave Jonah inside the fish!


11
The Reckoning

My soul, be prudent, fear God and devote
   all your efforts to save yourself! Hoarding wealth
   is a vain ambition, a cause of envy and anxiety.
   Follow moderation’s path – all who seek to harvest
   the world are driven by restive hopes, mounted
   on the back of a vehement desire that drives
   you from country to country. Turn to God, be wary
   of others, what need do you have of them? Follow
   moderation’s path – only God, One and Eternal,
   can help you attain your hopes. Moderation is your best
   course of action, so exert yourself, walk the path
   of goodness. Greed impoverishes through envy.
   God will provide, to the end of time. To prepare
   for misfortune is hopeless, death will only stick in your throat.
   Many have failed due to a lack of resolve and vigour,
   others, travelling in search of God’s sustenance, reach
   lush fields of plenty. Don’t you see our destinies
   lying in ambush, ready to sunder soul from body?
   Death never misses its target – I’d give all my money
   and children to protect my soul. The righteous path
   is closed to those who persist in error.
                                                                        Your soul
   has made you keen to pass beyond tomorrow,
   aren’t you afraid death may come before the morrow?
   Prepare to welcome death as your guest, ready the best
   of everything before it arrives, act now for the sake
   of the next abode where you’ll dwell until eternity’s end.
   Tomorrow, you’ll step onto Hell’s Bridge, my soul,
   so make your preparations now.
                                                             What can I plead
   at the Reckoning when my hands testify to my crimes?


12
Death’s Arrow

Side with God – He will side with you.
   Fear Him – you never know, maybe…
   prepare for Death – it’s as if you…
   Death’s arrow may miss you or kill
   you, so trust in God, don’t let your fear
   slip for we exist in bodies
   made up of states of motion
   and rest – baubles that will decay,
   faculties that will be terminated.


13
Deny Your Soul Its Desires

You recline amid mixing bowls
   and wineskins to the tune of a lute
   strummed by a seductive singer.
   If you don’t deny your soul its desires
   and care for it properly, then believe me,
   the fault is yours. I’ve had my fill
   of constant acts of disobedience
   and they’ve had their fill of me.
   What’s more odious than the sight
   of a sensible man at my age
   luxuriating in states of ecstasy?


14
Silent Warnings

Silent warnings, speechless heralds
   announcing your death, intimations
   of decaying bones, of perplexed bodies
   without souls, visions of your face buried
   in the ground, alive not dead.


15
Written by the Angels

Many sins prized by man are praised
   for their honour and nobility, ever valued
   and esteemed. Men don’t grind their teeth
   in regret over them but swell with pride
   at their mention, in haughty indignation.
   They’ve been written down by the angels
   against me, records Time will never erase.


Salvation?

16
The Ability to Forgive

Stop your attacks, they’re making me worse!
   Treat me with my disease – a yellow wine
   to banish all my cares, so potent one touch
   brings joy to a stone, poured by a pussy
   dressed as a cock, the love toy of buggers
   and shaggers. In the dark she lifts the ibrik
   and the room is bathed in a pearly glow
   beaming from her face, then pours from the jug’s
   mouth a liquid so pure it makes us screw
   up our eyes, too subtle for coarse water,
   but, mixed with light, would produce a fire-
   work display. It was passed among heroes
   who’d humbled Time, as she danced to their music.

I weep for their loss, not for some ruin
   where Hind and Asmāʾ once lived.
   How ridiculous that tents be pitched
   for Durrah, visited by camels and sheep
   at sunset.
                                    Tell that self-declared
   philosopher, ‘There’s more than is dreamt of
   in your metaphysics. You may be free of sin,
   but don’t deny God the ability to forgive –
   that’s a serious affront to our creed.’


17
God’s Pardon

Abū Nuwās, you with the unkempt hair,
   be serious, patient, and accepting.
   You’ve suffered a few wrongs at Time’s
   hands, but you’ve had much more joy.
   You, great sinner, God’s pardon
   is greater than your sin – the greatest things
   are small next to the merest hint
   of God’s forgiveness. Man is subject
   to God’s decree – we have no agency,
   He governs and disposes creation.


18
The Vices of My Youth

When my head was attacked by grey hair,
   the vices of my youth were over and I grew
   averse to pleasure’s haunts, rejected
   by my better sense. I heeded reproaches
   and was full of fear at the warning voices.
   Do you continue to pay no heed, foolish
   man? Inattention is no excuse. On the day
   when the brands appear on our foreheads,
   there’ll be nothing we can do to achieve
   release, though I’ll hope for God’s pardon
   despite my excesses and misdeeds.


19
Hope

Lord, though my sins be many and great
   I know Your pardon is greater.
   If only the good man can hope
   for Your mercy, who is the sinner to hope
   for and pray to? I humbly beseech
   You, Lord, as You’ve commanded –
   if You reject my hand, who’ll show mercy?
   Hope, Your pardon, and my Muslim creed
   are my only means of reaching out to You.


20

My Sins

My sins weigh greatly upon me,
but Your pardon is greater, Lord.


21

My Declaration

My Lord, You’ve always been kind to me
though I’ve failed to thank Your kindness.
Many have excuses to plead and cases
to make before You – my excuse
is my declaration that I have no excuse.

22

Grave Sins

You generously forgive grave sins –
in Your bounty, forgive this slave’s sins.



Postscript

Al-Ḥasan ibn Hāniʾ al-Ḥakamī (Hasan son of Haniʾ of the tribe of Hakam) was born in Ahwāz on the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, ca. 756–58 CE. His Persian mother was a bamboo weaver and his Arab father was a soldier whose death when al-Ḥasan was very young led his mother to relocate the family to Basra. He memorized the Qurʾan at an early age and, while working as an apprentice aloe-cutter, was introduced to Wālibah ibn al-Ḥubāb (d. 786), a member of a group known as the ‘Kufan transgressives’, self-styled devotees of Iblis (Satan) and the pleasures of wine and male-male love. Al-Ḥasan is described as a brigand, wearing his hair in bangs, dressed in a gown with oversized sleeves, and sporting closed (i.e., not open-toed) sandals. Perhaps this earned him the nickname Abū Nuwās, i.e., The Man with Dishevelled Hair.

Back in Basra, Abū Nuwās studied poetry and other linguistic and religious sciences, including law and the Qurʾanic disciplines. A move to Baghdad failed to grant him access to the court and so secure the patronage of the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd: although he enjoyed the support of several elite families, including being a co-convivialist of the caliph’s son al-Amīn, his position was always precarious and he was regularly imprisoned, so he tried his luck in Egypt during 805–06 CE. When Hārūn died, al-Amīn’s brief caliphate was the culmination of Abū Nuwās’s career as a successful poet. Tradition has it that their friendship was not purely platonic.

Abū Nuwās died between 813 and 815. As befits such a self-mythologizing poet, there are four accounts of his death: by poison; in a tavern, goblet in hand; beaten to death for a poem he had composed; and in prison. Abū Nuwās probably died from an illness. He was survived by a daughter.

Abū Nuwās’s life story became hagiography during and after his lifetime, much of it, ancient and modern, attested by his several volumes of poetry, in which some 1500 poems are preserved. One strand of the hagiography avers that on his deathbed he repented of his wicked ways and piously reaffirmed his devotion to Islam. The following translations, from examples of two genres known in Arabic as khamriyyāt (‘wine poems’) and zuhdiyyāt (‘renunciant poems’), are organized according to the sequence of sin, sorrow, and salvation?, a narrative arc sanctioned by the hagiography.

The reader may find features of these poems baffling. I will address three in brief: wine; gender dynamics; predestination.

Wine, i.e., alcohol produced from grapes, was only one of the many types of liquor available in Abū Nuwās’s Iraq. There were fruit-based liquors, including date wine, as well as honey-based liquors like mead and bragget. Some drinks had psychotropic hallucinogens added. Debate raged about the legality of these drinks: some scholars allowed them to be imbibed providing the drinker did not become intoxicated (but how do you determine when intoxication occurs?); some banned only grape-based wine; others permitted wine if a third was burnt off to remove the alcohol; others preferred outright condemnation. Alcohol was sold in taverns by non-Muslims, often women (our poems refer to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians). Wine was frequently enjoyed in the gardens and grounds of Iraq’s many Christian monasteries, where food and the company of young men were also on hand: I refer the interested reader to al-Shābushtī, The Book of Monasteries, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick (New York, 2023).

In the following poems, we encounter red and white wines, as well as a drink known as Isfanṭ (etymologically cognate with ‘absinthe’), derived from wormwood, best drunk chilled (the north wind is often credited with this function). Few drinks were taken neat; most required diluting with water (rainwater is the mix of choice) and the reaction of wine when mixed with water is a highlight of many poems. Alcohol was rarely consumed on one’s own, but preferably in company or a group, served by a young man or woman, known as the saqi, to the sound of the lute accompanied by a singer. The songs were adapted from famous poems and Abū Nuwās often quotes their opening lines.

This wine poetry revels in paradoxes, blurred and confused identities, of inversions and subversions. Reality is metamorphosed and so a drunken debauch in a garden can become an instance of Paradise on earth; a drinking party degenerates into a drunken brawl over a saqi and is transmogrified into an epic military campaign. The same applies to gender. The wine (the noun is feminine in Arabic) is always female, a virgin spinster (aged yet young) and a desirable bride, the drinker her suitor, sometimes the broker arranging the wine’s dower. In these poems, moon-faced young men represent ideal beauty, but even they are sometimes described in female terms. In ‘Peeking through the Clouds’, the saqi is described in terms derived from the canon of Arabic love poetry: doe-like eyes, a supple neck, heavy buttocks; in ‘A Phoenix’, he ‘looks like a girl’. The girls who serve the wine were often dressed as boys and thus in ‘The Ability to Forgive’ are said to appeal both to drinkers who went in for anal sex with men and those who preferred vaginal intercourse. Like the wine that the poems celebrate, these gender dynamics are fluid.

The dominant worldview in Iraq was heavily deterministic: one’s life and one’s actions were preordained by God. Such an outlook encourages contradictory responses: of fatalistic resignation; of wilful error as rebellion and self-expression, though of course error was also pre-ordained. If error is predetermined by God, is God then responsible for our misdeeds? Has He doomed us to salvation or damnation, irrespective of our actions? What is the point of the moral, ethical, and legal directives in the Qurʾan, the word of God? At this point, God’s mercy takes centre-stage: the sinner can always repent and beg God for forgiveness.

In his renunciant poems, Abū Nuwās explores the relationship between self and speaker (in a style I find reminiscent of the twentieth century confessional poets). He dramatizes the privacy of repentance, for the act of praying for pardon is uncertain, vertiginous, and deracinating: how do we know that our pardon will be successful? Remorse is alienating and highly solipsistic: recourse to God does not offer any consolation for the uncertainty of belief, unlike error which all too readily becomes an end in itself.

Abū Nuwās’s poetry, abounding as it does in paradoxes and the confusion of the intercategory, entertains error and repentance in an easy blend of unresolved contradiction.

I refer readers wanting to read more of the poetry of Abū Nuwās to Alex Rowell’s witty and readable rhyming translation: Vintage Humour. The Islamic Wine Poetry of Abu Nuwas (London, 2017); and to Abū Nuwās, A Demon Spirit. Arabic Hunting Poems, edited and translated by James E. Montgomery (New York, 2024).