Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī, The Book of Rain, translated by David Larsen

 

No rivers flow into the Arabian Peninsula. Before desalinization technology, all its fresh water originated from the sky. Great tracts of the peninsula were inhabitable only at rain-seasonal intervals, and have until modern times been the exclusive territory of pastoral-nomadic communities. That these communities would develop an elaborate vocabulary for precipitation and groundwater is unsurprising, and yet (cautioned by the fallacy of “Eskimo Words for Snow”) I refrain from supposing a causal link. The proliferation of Arabic words for weather is proportionate to the proliferation of Arabic words for all kinds of things. (David Larsen, “INTRODUCTION”)

I found myself taken with The Book of Rain, “the earliest known catalogue of Arabic weather-words, by early Arabic linguist Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī,” as translated by New York-based scholar, poet and translator of pre-modern Arabic literature, David Larsen (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) (although I would caution him that the people of the Canadian north, in my understanding, consider that particular moniker a colonial term, and prefer to be referred to as the Inuit). The Book of Rain is not only accompanied by an expansive critical introduction by the translator, but a book’s worth of footnotes at the end, adding layering and nuance to the study of such an intriguing text more than a thousand years old (the publisher’s website notes that the author died in “Basra circa 830 CE, at the age of ninety-five,” if you want to have a temporal sense of the original composition). If you want to know a people, a culture, there’s no better way, one might say, than to approach  from the foundation of language, and Larsen offers incredibly detailed insight into the context and reasons for differences both temporally and culturally far distant from most western understandings. As Larsen writes in his introduction: “For Arabic langue worthy of study, there were two funds of evidence. One was historical precedent, as enshrined in proverbial expression, pre-Islamic poetry, the text of the Qur’ān and, to a lesser extent, Prophetic hadith. The other was contemporary Bedouin speech. Certain tribes’ supposed immunity to linguistic corruption gave their dialects a classical authority that was tantamount to the ancients.” Is this a book of notation or of language or of beautiful music? From the opening line of “[NAMES OF RAIN]”:

First of the names for rain is al-qiṭqiṭ “The Tiny Grain.” This is the finest of the rains.

How does a title such as this emerge with a poetry publisher? That is a curiosity, by itself, although there are obvious parallels around language and thinking, and critical thinking about language and subject matter in the context of its time and place, its landscape and culture. Larsen, further in his introduction, asks: “Does the Book of Rain count as natural history, or is it a book of language only? The answer depends on your expectations of natural history as a literary genre. In early modern Europe, natural history’s emergence is identified with the purge of folkloric material from inquiry into plant and animal life. A rededicationof language to nonlinguistic knowledge is how Michel Foucault characterized it, saying that natural history ‘exists as a task only in so far as things and language happen to be separate.’ This obviously excludes the Book of Rain, whose sources are purely linguistic.” From the section “NAMES OF WATERS,” as it begins:

Great or small, a river is called al-nahr and al-nahar; al-anhār is its plural. Al-jadāwil “canals,” sg. al-jadwal, are rivulets made to split off from a river to irrigate crops and palm groves. Al-qanā “an aqueduct” is a canal made to flow underground, and is not called qanā, pl. aqnā (or, as some might say, qanat, pl. quniyy) unless it has a covering. Any uncovered watercourse is a jadwal, and a khudad “channel” is similar to it. All three words are used whether they run dry or flow with water.
            Al-kurr is a “holding pool” where water accumulates. (The rope that men loop around the trunk of a palm in order to climb it is called al-karr.)
            To describe water as la’īn “sordid” is to find fault with it. Al-‘udmul, pl. al-‘adāmil, is “well-aged” water, and anything else that is old. Water that does not cover the ankle is described as ḍaḥl “shallow” and ḍaḥḍaḥ “superficial.” Al-raqāq “a thin layer” is used in a similar fashion. Al-barḍ is a “meager” amount of water that you manage to gather, and verb tabarraḍa means “to seek water.”