16th-century Malay translation of the Burda is an interlinear Malay rendering of the celebrated Arabic panegyric Kasidatu’l-Burda (“Poem of the Mantle”) composed by the Egyptian poet al-Busiri in the 13th century, preserved in a single manuscript that formed part of the Erpenius collection acquired by Cambridge University Library in 1632 and edited with Dutch translation by S. G. Evenhage in 1955. The manuscript, written in a Malay hand showing North Sumatran features, represents the oldest known Malay version of this universally popular Islamic poem and provides a critical terminus ad quem of circa 1600 for the penetration of Arabic literary models into written Malay.
Provenance and Manuscript History
The codex containing the translation belonged to a small group of old Malay manuscripts that travelled from the Indonesian archipelago to the Netherlands in the possession of the Leiden orientalist Thomas Erpenius (d. 1624). After Erpenius’s death the collection failed to be purchased by Leiden University and was sold at auction in Antwerp; it was bought by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whose widow presented the manuscripts to Cambridge University Library in 1632. The Malay items lay unnoticed until E. G. Browne drew attention to them in 1894, whereupon Ph. S. van Ronkel described four Erpenius manuscripts in 1896, including the Burda codex. Van Ronkel established that at least three of the four manuscripts bore an ownership note of the merchant Pieter Willemsz. Floris van Elbingh, who resided in Aceh in 1604 and likely acquired them there for Erpenius. The Burda manuscript itself is written as an interlinear gloss beneath the Arabic text of the poem, a format that testifies to the intensive study of Arabic religious literature in the Malay world.
Linguistic and Literary Significance
S. G. Evenhage argues that this translation, though not an original composition, is the most valuable early document for studying the historical influence of Arabic on Malay because: (1) the Arabic original is fixed and well known, allowing precise analysis of translation technique; (2) the poem is short enough to be exhaustively compared; and (3) the interlinear format reveals word-for-word rendering strategies, including the retention of Arabic words with Malay suffixes when equivalents were difficult. Van Ronkel had judged the translation “very confused,” but Evenhage attributes this to the genre’s inherent constraints rather than translator incompetence. The manuscript’s North Sumatran (likely Aceh) origin is confirmed by a fragment of an Acehnese translation of the Burda identified in the Bataviaas Genootschap manuscript B.G. 303 by P. Voorhoeve.
Contents and Structure
The edition presents: (I) introduction covering manuscript history, the age of the Hikajat Muhammad Hanafiah, the importance of the Burda translation for early Malay Islamic literature, notes on kasida form, the legend of Ka’b ibn Zuhayr’s Burda, the popularity of al-Busiri’s poem, and Wahhabi criticism of it; (II) synopsis of the poem’s content; (III) description of the manuscript, orthography, and morphology; (IV) list of Arabic words in the Malay text; (V) the Malay text of the Burda; (VI) Dutch translation of the Malay text; (VII) glossary of important Malay words; (VIII) list of Arabic words in the translation; (IX) appendix with a fragment of a Malay translation of al-Ushi’s Bad’ al-Amali. The Malay translation covers the full Burda (161 verses in the Ralfs edition) plus one additional distichon (no. 54) not found in the Uri or Von Rosenzweig editions.
Scholarly Context
The Burda (full title al-Kawākib al-durriyya fī madḥ khayr al-bariyya, “The Shining Stars in Praise of the Best of Creation”) was composed by Sharaf al-Dīn Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al-Būsīrī (AH 608–694 / 1213–1296), born in Būsīr al-Malak in the Egyptian province of Bani Suef, died in Alexandria, buried near Imam al-Shafi’i in Fustat. It became the most widely translated and commented Arabic poem in the Islamic world. Prior Malay translations of Arabic works include the Hikajat Muhammad Hanafiah (from Persian) and the Alexander Romance (based on al-Ṯaʿlabī’s Arabic version), the latter possibly extant in pre-1511 Malacca. The Burda translation’s terminus ad quem of ca. 1600 makes it a cornerstone for dating the Arabization of Malay literary language.
See Also
- al-Busiri
- Kasidatu’l-Burda
- Thomas Erpenius
- Pieter Willemsz. Floris van Elbingh
- Aceh
- Cambridge University Library
- S. G. Evenhage
- Ph. S. van Ronkel
- Bataviaas Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen
- Hikajat Muhammad Hanafiah
- Alexander Romance (Malay)
- al-Ushi
- Bad’ al-Amali
- Imam al-Shafi’i
- Wahhabi criticism of the Burda
- 1604
- 1624
- 1632
- 1894
- 1896
- 1955
Source
Een 16de eeuwse Maleise vertaling van de Burda van al-Būsīrī (Arabisch lofdicht op Mohammad), uitgegeven en vertaald door S. G. Evenhage, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Deel XVIII (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), pp. 1–103. OCR source: 20260707_232246_DLP-54-Een_16de_eeuwse_Maleise_vertaling_van_de_Burda_van_al_Bu_s_i_ri_OCR.txt, pp. 1–12.