318 sharon kinoshita
side by side in texts and inscriptions,” such that “it seems at once redundant and
essential to point out that the people who spoke those languages interacted with each
other as well” (Mallette, 2013: 261)—an interaction vividly captured in the famous
lament of the ninth-century Cordoban Paul Alvarus that “Christians love to read the
poems and romances of the Arabs” and that “[f]or every one who can write a letter in
Latin ... there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance”
(Menocal, Scheindlin, and Sells, 2000: 83).
In Iberian studies, critical attention to cross-linguistic, cross-confessional relations
has focused primarily on lyric. Central to this history is the muwashshaha, an Andalusian
form in classical Arabic, composed in strophes (in contrast to the classical qasida),
sung rather than recited, and ending in a coda (kharja) in the vernacular—sometimes
Arabic but sometimes Iberian Romance, and often cast in a female voice. Constitutively
hybrid in language and dialogic in register, the muwashshaha was also adapted into
classical Hebrew (again with vernacular Arabic or Romance kharjas), innovating a
tradition of secular verse in Hebrew (Dodds, Menocal, and Balbale, 2008: 144–151).^6
Another important translinguistic genre is the maqama, a collection of formulaic
short narratives in rhymed prose featuring a trickster hero and a narrator-witness.
In Iberia, the canonical collection by the Baghdadi scholar al-Hariri (d. 1122) was
carefully copied and studied, and taken as a foil by the near-contemporary writer
al-Saraqusti (in a text with a similarly-named hero and narrator, but in a more intricate
rhyme scheme), even as the genre was adapted to courtly contexts, in the form of
occasional critiques, panegyrics, and commentaries. Meanwhile, Andalusi Jews who
migrated northward to the Christian Iberian kingdoms or to Provence in the wake of
the Almohad invasion of Iberia (mid-twelfth century) began composing maqamat
(together with other genres based on Arabic models) in Hebrew—adapted to conven-
tions of Jewish writing and eventually incorporating local, non-Arabic elements.
Surviving texts from Italy, Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, and Greece attest to their wide dif-
fusion. At the same time, having moved to the Muslim East, the Toledo-born transla-
tor and polymath al-Harizi (who had previously composed maqamat in Hebrew)
composed a new version in Judeo–Arabic, the better to appeal to the tastes of local
Jewish communities (Drory, 2000).
Considering literary works not as exemplars of singular national traditions but in
the context of linguistic polysystems can produce revelatory new readings, as we can
see in the case of two texts, produced 1500 years apart at opposite ends of the
Mediterranean. The first is the Greek poem the Lock of Berenice, composed in the
third century bce in Ptolemaic Alexandria, the seat of a bicephalous kingship
(Macedonian and pharaonic) that “institutionalized heterogeneity at every level of
the social order.” In contrast to city-states like Athens, which cultivated an ideology
of autochthony and self-sufficiency, multilingual Alexandria was a “complex mosaic of
peoples, tongues, religions, social and political practices, drawn from every quarter of
the Levantine world and never fully assimilated to one another” (Selden, 1998: 293,
297–298). Callimachus’s Lock of Berenice is set during the reign of the poet’s patron,
Ptolemy III Euergetes.^7 Soon after his accession, the king set off to Asia in defense of
his sister, widow of the recently-assassinated ruler of Syria, while his new queen,
Berenice of Cyrene, cut a lock of her hair and dedicated it at the temple of Aphrodite
for the success of her husband’s expedition. By the next day, however, the lock disap-
peared—translated to the heavens as a new constellation. Told from the perspective of