Poems Of Wine & Revelry

First published in 2005. Arabic literature has a distinguished tradition of bacchanals but none are so consistently entertaining or explicit or iconoclastic as those of Abu Nuwas al_hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami (c. 756-c.815), the ''bad boy'' of Abbasid poetry. In his khamriyyat, Abu Nuwas offers a glimpse of the hedonistic and dissipated world he inhabited: the world of Baghdad high society at the ze...