Arabic Love Poetry from the Desert: Majnun Leyla, Arabic Text, Commentary and Translat

wow what poetry!

I bought this book because I wanted to read and study some classical Arabic poetry in an attempt to improve my level of Arabic, as well as to enjoy the poetry for its own sake of course. For these purposes it is fine, although as with other parallel texts it would have been nice if the English translation had been obscured somehow, maybe by putting it on the following page, so that it was not so easy to refer to. I assume that this book is aimed at students since Arabic speakers would not need the translation, and non-Arabic speakers would not need the Arabic, an assumption I make about all parallel text publications. It would simply be better exercise in my view for the reader/student to determine the meaning then check the translation.As far as the product itself is concerned I have some reservations, and this is the reason for the three stars. I suspect that this book is one of those that is printed on demand. The reason I say this is because the English (the less important text) is crisp and clear, looking like it has been printed from text (by PostScript or similar). The Arabic (the more important text) is not always so clear, looking like it has been reproduced from a scanned image. This means that in one or two places the diacritics and hariket are difficult to read. Knowledge of grammar etc. might help because the correct diacritic/harika could be construed from context however this knowledge might not always be available to a student (such as myself) and in any case we are talking about classical Arabic grammar and poetry, both of which might follow a slightly different set of rules from MSA.If my theory about the 'scanned image' origin of the Arabic text is true I find it odd as it is possible these days to produce perfectly acceptable Arabic typesetting that can be fixed using PDF or similar, thereby avoiding the problems of unavailable fonts and other typesetting/printing issues.Having said that I like the idea of print on demand - it saves paper, minimises storage space, and above all means that low volume books such as this are readily and cheaply available which they would not have been twenty years ago.

Great collection. If buying to learn Arabic be forewarned that the translations are somewhat....liberal.

I gave it to my significant other as a gift. He loves it. The poems are lovely.♡