Page:The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare.djvu/12

 repelled from such a work by the prejudices of native grammarians who affect to despise "Abu Zeyd" on account of the vulgar dialect in which it stands written. Whether such vulgarity was always its feature may be doubted. The matter of the poem is so good that it is difficult to believe that the form also was not originally a worthy one. It seems more probable that in the long history of its oral transmission through so many centuries the diction should have become corrupted than that it should have been from the beginning as irregular as we now find it. As it stands, with its local vulgarisms, and its uncertain and halting metre, it puzzles and repels the learned, and needs to be dealt with in an indulgent spirit, and with some knowledge of Bedouin customs and ways of thought, by whoever would give a fair idea of its merit in another tongue. It is in such a spirit that the present translation has been attempted. No liberty whatever has been taken with the matter of the narrative nor with its form, half prose, half verse, which has been strictly adhered to in all its alternations. Only the colloquialisms have been ignored, and for the metrical irregularities has been substituted a uniform metre as nearly as possible reproducing to the English ear the rhythm of the less imperfect portions of the poem. In reading it, it must be remembered that the original is not, strictly speaking, a written poem with an authentic text, though a version of it in Arabic has in recent years been printed; but that it is still what the Iliad and Odyssey probably were for many centuries, an unwritten epic