Andalusian Iberias: From Spanish to Iberian Literature

Abstract

On the first day of my undergraduate “Andalusian Iberias” seminar, I distribute a multilingual and multiscriptural handout of a kharja (pl. kharajāt) composed by Ibn al-Rāfi’ Ra’suh, an eleventh-century poet from Toledo.¹ The mixture of Ibero-Romance and Arabic that comprises this refrain, found, as the Arabic word kharaja (to leave) implies, at the end of an Arabic strophic poem, piques students’ curiosity: “Was the earliest extant Spanish verse really written in Arabic script?” they ask. Over the course of the conversation, this initial curiosity turns to terror: “Must we know Arabic, not to mention Hebrew, Latin, Catalan, Portuguese, and Provençal, in order to take this course? Isn’t this an upper-level Spanish elective?” I assure my students, typically no more than ten, that although knowledge of Spanish and English suffices, we will also read Spanish texts alongside works of theology, philosophy, and literature translated from those other languages. One goal of this approach is to see whether Spanish literature looks different when studied within this interwoven Iberian fabric. But we aim also to read works from beyond the Spanish tradition on their own terms, paying attention to their generic conventions and circumstances of production and circulation. In this way, Spanish literature serves as a gateway into the cultural complexity of the Iberian Peninsula, so splendidly epitomized by Ibn al-Rāfi’ Ra’suh’s kharja.