Anthology of Songs and Melodies of Andalusian Heritage

It seemed to us that there would be a real interest, for the natives and Arabists¹ alike, to have between their hands a collection of ghernata [Granada] poetry as complete as possible and methodically presented.

Realizing this project was not without difficulty of every order: we were required to knock on many doors and show an obstinate perseverance. Sometimes they were satisfied to give us one or two poems, sometimes they gave us more or less complete manuscripts with truncated poems, unrhymed verses, or false rhymes.

Therefore it was not without a long labor of compilation and comparison, without patient research that we were able to constitute our collection, to class each melody in its nouba,² to assign it its rational meter, to reconstitute it, in a word, in its true form as it was sung by the poets and musicians of Granada and of Cordoba in the age of Arab gentility. [ . . . ]

[This book was composed—Eds.] without any literary pretension . . . the product of a modest intention to gather, in one volume, scattered poems which are difficult to find, which are exposed to all sorts of alterations and perhaps to an approaching disappearance when they are in fact one of the oldest and least contestable riches among the poetic treasures of Arabic literature. [ . . . ]

These poems were not yet collected or classified in books. There indeed exist, in the hands of certain Moors, manuscripts of ghernata more or less complete. But each owner is excessively jealous of his property; he refuses to share it and is satisfied to enrich it when he can with some new piece that he heard or that he obtained for a great sum from a native musician. In these circumstances, the Arab public cannot procure the text of the songs that it passionately loves and that remain the monopoly of the privileged few.