War Songs

ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād (Author) ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād was one of the most famous warrior-poets of pre-Islamic Arabia. A semi-legendary hero from the sixth century AD, ʿAntarah was born into slavery as the son of an Arab father and an African mother. Many of his poems are about his love for ʿAblah, daughter of the tribe's shaykh--a love thwarted by his low social status.James E. Montgomery (Edited and Translated by) James E. Montgomery is Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity Hall. His latest publications are In Deadly Embrace: Arabic Hunting Poems, Fate the Hunter: Early Arabic Hunting Poems, and Kalīlah and Dimnah: Fables of Virtue and Vice, with Michael Fishbein. In 2024 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.Peter Cole (Foreword by) Peter Cole has published several books of poems and many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic, both medieval and modern. He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and in 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

"An unmistakable voice... What is perhaps most beautiful about War Songs is how 'Antarah hints at tenderness beneath the violence, defending slaughter for a cause and remaining faithful to tribe and family, even in the face of death." (Marginalia (Los Angeles Review of Books)) "The Library of Arabic Literature has another landmark success with this so-called untranslatable poet...Sixth-century Arabia may be 'strange,' but the years of struggle on the part of this scholar-writer and his poet collaborator have given the general reader a visceral insight into this world in compelling, beautiful poetry." (Times Literary Supplement) "Beautifully accomplished by James E. Montgomery in collaboration with fellow scholar-translator, Richard Sieburth...Dynamic, fully cinematic translations that effect 'the transfer of energy' essential to literary translation...An exciting addition to the LAL corpus." (IASA Bulletin) "War Songs is a well-presented collection, with useful supplementary material, from the introductory matter to the appendices." (The Complete Review) "Will be a cause for celebration among those Arabists who are devoted to academic excellence and have a taste for literature, two things that—it can never be said enough—provide us with the humanities." (Bulletin Critique)