Section V
        on the prose-rhyme and the poetry of the nights

A.—­The Saj’a.

According to promise in my Foreword (p. xiii.), I here proceed to offer a few observations concerning the Saj’a or rhymed prose and the Shi’r, or measured sentence, that is, the verse of The Nights.  The former has in composition, metrical or unmetrical three distinct forms.  Saj’a mutawazi (parallel), the most common is when the ending words of sentences agree in measure, assonance and final letter, in fact our full rhyme; next is Saj’a mutarraf (the affluent), when the periods, hemistichs or couplets end in words whose terminal letters correspond, although differing in measure and number; and thirdly, Saj’a muwazanah (equilibrium) is applied to the balance which affects words corresponding in measure but differing in final letters.[FN#431]

Al-Saj’a, the fine style or style fleuri, also termed Al-Badi’a, or euphuism, is the basis of all Arabic euphony.  The whole of the Koran is written in it; and the same is the case with the Makamat of Al-Hariri and the prime masterpieces of rhetorical composition:  without it no translation of the Holy Book can be satisfactory or final, and where it is not the Assemblies become the prose of prose.  Thus universally used the assonance has necessarily been abused, and its excess has given rise to the saying “Al-Saj’s faj’a”—­prose rhyme’s a pest.  English translators have, unwisely I think, agreed in rejecting it, while Germans have not.  Mr Preston assures us that “rhyming prose is extremely ungraceful in English and introduces an air of flippancy”:  this was certainly not the case with Friedrich Rueckert’s version of the great original and I see no reason why it should be so or become so in our tongue.  Torrens (Pref. p. vii.) declares that “the effect of the irregular sentence with the iteration of a jingling rhyme is not pleasant in our language:”  he therefore systematically neglects it and gives his style the semblance of being “scamped” with the object of saving study and trouble.  Mr. Payne (ix. 379) deems it an “excrescence born of the excessive facilities for rhyme afforded by the language,” and of Eastern delight in antithesis of all kinds whether of sound or of thought; and, aiming elaborately at grace of style, he omits it wholly, even in the proverbs.

The weight of authority was against me but my plan compelled me to disregard it.  The dilemma was simply either to use the Saj’a or to follow Mr. Payne’s method and “arrange the disjecta membra of the original in their natural order”; that is, to remodel the text.  Intending to produce a faithful copy of the Arabic, I was compelled to adopt the former, and still hold it to be the better alternative.  Moreover I question Mr. Payne’s dictum (ix. 383) that “the Seja-form is utterly foreign to the genius of English prose and that its