For Mansour Ajami, Arabic poetry is that Midas touch which transmutes the most commonplace words, the most mundane meanings and the most pedestrian images into the shimmering gold of the poetically soaring and sublime. This is what he calls “the alchemy of glory,” sublimating the earthly language, truth and meaning of daily life into poetry's glorious languages, into poetry's luminous meanings and its noble truths. Thus, when poetry pours its alchemical waters over worldly time it washes away the timeliness of time to give us the timeless.

Ajami's exquisite critical introduction to this topical bilingual anthology of classical Arabic poetry, spanning eight centuries, brings to the fore the debates, squabbles and controversies of classical Arabic literary critics and theoreticians concerning the dialectics of the “true” and the “false” in poetry and their relevance to devices like license, latitude, hyperbole, exaggeration, excess, extravagance, simile, metaphor and so on.

This anthology is topical, presenting the best of Arabic classical poetry's musings over the many faceted states of the human condition, among them love, generosity, life, time, youth, beauty, ecstasy, longing, wine, death and plenty more. Ajami's selection of the topical verses and poems was guided by what was deemed best in its genre by the quasi consensus of the great classical Arab literary critics and theoreticians.

Ajami is reputed for his superb literary translations from Arabic into English, and I dare claim some of his renderings could almost work as English literature. His equal mastery of the source language and of the target language and his talent and skill in moving seamlessly back and forth between the two languages have all reached their peak in this anthology.

All lovers of poetry, specialists in comparative literature, multicultural literary enthusiasts, translators of Arabic literature into European languages, sensitive Middle Eastern area studies experts, and students of the Arabic language and of its history and culture will all find a great deal to satisfy, edify and enrich them in this extraordinary volume.