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For the Egyptian oasis with same name, see Kharga Oasis. El-Kharga' (meaning the outer oasis ( Arabic الخارجة is the southernmost of Egypt 's five western oases.

The kharja (in Arabic , meaning "final"), also known as jarcha in Spanish, is the final refrain of a series of a muwashshah, a lyric genre of Al-Andalus (the Islamic Iberian Peninsula) written in Arabic or Hebrew, commonly with five stanzas, each consisting of four to six lines. Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language Muwashshah or muwaššah ( Arabic: موشٌح, literally "girdled" plural muwāshshahāt موشـّحات Al-Andalus (الأندلس was the Arabic name given to those parts of the Iberian Peninsula governed by Muslims or For other meanings including people named 'Islam' see Islam (disambiguation. The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe, and includes modern day Spain, Portugal, Andorra The final two lines of each stanza act as a refrain which is known as a kharja.

The kharjas are believed by most specialists to have been in a Romance vernacular, blended with some Arabic expressions and words, which has been called Mozarabic. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all Mozarabic was a continuum of closely related Romance dialects spoken in Muslim dominated areas of the Iberian Peninsula during the early stages of the These refrains were not composed by the authors of the muwashshahs: these authors listened to the songs of the Christian population, the Mozarabs, and added them to their own compositions, which were in fact often inspired by the jarchas. A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth The Mozarabs (in Spanish: mozárabes; in moçárabes in Catalan: mossàrabs; from musta'rib "مستعرب" “arabicized” With examples dating back to the 11th century, this genre of poetry is believed to be among the oldest in any Romance language, and certainly the earliest recorded form of lyric poetry in Ibero-Romance. This article is about a subdivision of the Romance language family

Its rediscovery in the 20th century by Hebrew scholar Samuel Miklos Stern and Arabist Emilio García Gómez is generally thought to have cast new light on the evolution of Romance languages. The twentieth century of the Common Era began on This is an article about the western scholars known as Arabists, not the political movement Pan-Arabism. Emilio García Gómez ( 4 June 1905 &ndash 31 May 1995) was a Spanish Arabist literary historian and critic whose talent as a poet

The kharja likely has its roots in popular lyric songs and in the expression of love. Although the majority of known authors are men, the poetic voice is often that of a young woman. The addressee of the kharja is always the habib ("lover", in Arabic). Arab writers from Middle East or North Africa as Ahmad Al-Tifasi (1184-1253) referred to "songs in the Christian style" sung in Al-Andalus from ancient times that can be easily identified as the kharjas. The Middle East is a Subcontinent with no clear boundaries often used as a synonym to Near East, in opposition to Far East. North Africa or Northern Africa is the Northernmost Region of the African Continent, separated by the Sahara from Sub-Saharan [1]

The kharja is often read separately from the longer poem with which it was written down.

Contents

Debate over Reading

Modern translations of the Kharjas are a matter of debate particularly because Hebrew and Arabic scripts do not include vowels. A large spectrum of translations is possible given the ambiguity created by the missing vowels. Because of this, most translations of these texts will be disputed by some. Further debate arises around the mixed vocabulary used by the authors. The linguistic, political, and social history of the Iberian peninsula is expressed in the linguistic subtleties of these poems, which many scholars find to be both confusing and interesting.

A minority of scholars, such as Richard Hitchcock contend that the Kharjas are, in fact, not predominantly in a Romance language, but rather an extremely colloquial Arabic idiom bearing marked influence from the local Romance varieties. Such scholars accuse the academic majority of misreading the ambiguous script in untenable or questionable ways and ignoring contemporary Arab accounts of how Muwashshahas and Kharjas were composed. [2]

Example

An example of a typical kharja (and translation):

Vayse meu corachón de mib:
ya Rab, si me tornarád?
Tan mal meu doler li-l-habib!
Enfermo yed, cuánd sanarád?
My heart has left me,
Oh sir, will it return to me? (Alternate translation: Oh Lord, will you transform me?)
So great is my pain for my beloved!
It is sick, when will it be cured?,

This verse expresses the theme of the pain of longing for the absent lover (habib), a theme that was later developed in the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de Amigo from the 12th to the 14th century. Galician-Portuguese (also known as galego-português or galaico-português in Portuguese and as galego-portugués or galaico-portugués The cantiga de amigo (modern Portuguese and Galician spelling or cantiga d'amigo (the spelling found in medieval Galician-Portuguese It had some influence on the mystic poetry of Saint John of the Cross in the 16th century. For another saint who lived around the same time and area see John of Avila.

See also

External links

References

  1. ^ http://www.jubilatores.com/poetry.pdf
  2. ^ http://www.jstor.org/stable/view/3727967
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