Kharja
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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. The final two lines of each stanza act as a refrain which is known as a kharja.
The kharjas were in a Romance vernacular, blended with some Arabic expressions and words, which has been called Mozarabic. 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. With examples dating back to the 11th century, this genre of poetry is among the oldest in any Romance language, and certainly the earliest recorded form of lyric poetry in Ibero-Romance.
Its rediscovery in the 20th century by Hebrew scholar Samuel Miklos Stern and Arabist Emilio García Gómez has cast new light on the evolution of Romance languages.
The kharjas were written in Arabic or Hebrew script, which creates difficulties in achieving an unambiguous transcription, especially of vowels.
The kharja has its roots in popular lyric songs, in simple but emotive and graceful expressions of love. Some of the kharjas were composed by women. 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. [1]
The kharja is often read separately from the longer poem with which it was written down.
An example of a typical kharja (and translation):
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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. It had some influence on the mystic poetry of Saint John of the Cross in the 16th century.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Texts of fifty-five kharjas, with different transcriptions and translation to English French and German
- Ten kharjas translated to English
[edit] References
- GARCIA GOMEZ, Emilio, Jarchas Romances, serie árabe, ISBN 84-206-2652-X
- GALMÉS DE FUENTES, Álvaro, Las Jarchas Mozárabes, forma y Significado ISBN 84-7423-667-3
- NIMER, Miguel, Influências Orientais na Língua Portuguesa, ISBN 85-314-0707-9
- KHARJAS AND VILLANCICOS, by Armistead S.G., Journal of Arabic Literature, Volume 34, Numbers 1-2, 2003, pp. 3-19(17)[1]
