Andalusian Poems (Sun & Moon Classics, 181)

Based on the Emilio Garcia Gomez translation (1930s) of the Kitab rayat al-mubarrizin wa-gayat al-mumayizin or The Book of the Pennants of the Champions and Standards of the Elect collected from Arabian Andalusia from 1214-74, this collection reveals some of the greatest of poetry of Andalusia, where Arabs reigned from the 9th through the 13th century. The Boston Book Review wrote of the cloth edition (1994): "Here is translation at its best: delicately textured, precise ... and above all fluid, its syntax gently reproducing the sense of surprise, of movement checked by perception."

"This book ... may be for the twentieth century what The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was for the nineteenth: an eye-opening on a world of which the West was wholly ignorant." -- The New Yorker