The Vicissitudes of Two Lines of Poetry

All of us are familiar with the phenomenon of the author of a collection of poetry, or prose and poetry — a so-called adab book — making changes in a line of poetry. The fact is even more common among the rāwīs, the earliest transmitters of poetry. Such changes may result in what in western textual criticism is known as the lectio facilior, “the easier reading”. Sometimes such interventions may be useful in the sense that they give us an indication of how the line of poetry should be interpreted, but it goes without saying that caution is necessary. The rāwī or the collector may have misinterpreted the line; or what is worse, he may not understand the line and wilfully change a word or two to make the text intelligible to himself, or even to make it conform to his taste. This is, I think, what happened to two sets of two lines which will be discussed in this article.