Qasmuna’s poetry
in Arabic.

The Arabic anthologies of al-Suyuti and al-Maqqari transmit verses attributed to Qasmuna. They are later witnesses to her work. Francesca Gorgoni’s study reproduces Arabic text from that tradition; the anthology editions and their manuscripts have not been independently collated here.¹

This distinction matters: a poet’s words, an anthologist’s account of her life and a modern scholar’s interpretation reach us through different stages of transmission.

The garden poem makes its speaker’s longing legible through ripeness, an absent gatherer and passing youth. The Arabic text below follows Gorgoni’s reproduction, with vowel marks omitted and each hemistich on its own line:

ᴏʀɪɢɪɴᴀʟ:

أرى روضة قد حان منها قطافها ولست أرى جان يمد لها يدا فوا أسفي يمضي الشباب مضيعا ويبقى الذي ما إن أسميه مفردا²

ᴛʀᴀɴꜱʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴ:

I see a garden whose harvest time has come, yet I see no gatherer extending a hand toward it. Alas for me: youth passes, wasted, and what I do not name remains alone.³

The speaker names the garden and the loss of time while withholding another name. That combination creates both disclosure and reserve. The poem lets us hear a voice expressing desire; it does not by itself date a marriage or establish that the surrounding anecdote happened exactly as an anthologist tells it.

María Ángeles Gallego examines attempts to identify Qasmuna’s father with Smuel ha-Nagid. Similar names and conflicting chronological claims leave that identification disputed. Her criticism also concerns what happens to Qasmuna when scholars make her chiefly evidence about a famous man:

the actual focus of research has been Samuel and not Qasmuna herself.⁴

The family question can be investigated without making her poetry depend on its resolution. Nor should a contested pedigree select her century or supply a birth or death year. Gallego’s comparison supports treating her literary voice as an independent subject.⁵

Arabic is part of the literary history of יהודים YEHUDIM. Preserving this woman’s attributed verses expands the evidence readers can encounter. It neither turns the poem into a census of women’s freedoms nor makes one literary witness prove the conditions of an entire society.

• How does the poem reveal longing while leaving something unnamed?
• What becomes visible when Qasmuna is read as an author before the proposed identification of her father is settled?