Kharja


A kharja or kharjah, is the final refrain of a muwashshah, a lyric genre of Al-Andalus written in Arabic or Ibero-Romance.
The muwashshah consists of five stanzas of four to six lines, alternating with five or six refrains ; each refrain has the same rhyme and metre, whereas each stanza has only the same metre. The kharja appears often to have been composed independently of the muwashshah in which it is found.

Characteristics of the kharja

About a third of extant kharjas are written in Classical Arabic. Most of the remainder are in Andalusi Arabic, but there are about seventy examples that are written either in Ibero-Romance or with significant Romance elements. None are recorded in Hebrew even when the muwashshah is in Hebrew.
Generally, though not always, the kharja is presented as a quotation from a speaker who is introduced in the preceding stanza.
It is not uncommon to find the same kharja attached to several different muwashshahat. The Egyptian writer Ibn Sanā' al-Mulk, in his Dar al-Tirāz states that the kharja was the most important part of the poem, that the poets generated the muwashshah from the kharja, and that consequently it was considered better to borrow a good kharja than compose a bad one.
Kharjas may describe love, praise, the pleasures of drinking, but also ascetism.

Romance kharjas

Though they comprise only a fraction of the corpus of extant kharjas, it is the Romance kharjas that have attracted the greatest scholarly interest. 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.
Their 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 Romance kharjas are thematically comparatively restricted, being almost entirely about love. Approximately three quarters of them are put into the mouths of women, while the proportion for Arabic kharjas is nearer one fifth.

Debate over origins

Since the kharja may be written separately from the muwashshah, many scholars have speculated that the Romance Kharjas were originally popular Spanish lyrics that the court poets incorporated into their poems. Some similarities have been claimed with other early Romance lyrics in theme, metre, and idiom. Arabic writers from the Middle East or North Africa like Ahmad al-Tifashi referred to "songs in the Christian style" sung in Al-Andalus from ancient times that some have identified as the kharjas.
Other scholars dispute such claims, arguing that the kharjas stand firmly within the Arabic tradition with little or no Romance input at all, and the apparent similarities only arise because the kharjas discuss themes that are universal in human literature anyway.

Debate over language and reading

Modern translations of the Romance kharjas are a matter of debate particularly because the Arabic script does not include vowels. Most of them were copied by scribes who probably did not understand the language they were recording, which may have caused errors in transmission. A large spectrum of translations is possible given the ambiguity created by the missing vowels and potentially erroneous consonants. Because of this, most translations of these texts will be disputed by some. Severe criticism has been made of García Gómez's editions because of his palaeographical errors. Further debate arises around the mixed vocabulary used by the authors.
Most of the Romance kharjas are not written entirely in Romance, but include Arabic elements to a greater or lesser extent. It has been argued that such blending cannot possibly represent the natural speech-patterns of the Romance-speakers, and that the Romance kharjas must therefore be regarded as macaronic literature.
A minority of scholars, such as Richard Hitchcock contend that the Romance Kharjas are, in fact, not predominantly in a Romance language at all, 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 Muwashshahat and Kharjas were composed.

Examples

Romance

An example of a Romance Kharja by the Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi:
These verses express the theme of the pain of longing for the absent lover. Many scholars have compared such themes to the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de Amigo which date from c. 1220 to c. 1300, but “he early trend towards seeing a genetic link between kharajat and cantigas d’amigo seems now to have been over-hasty.”

Arabic

An example of an Arabic kharja:
The kharja is from a muwashshah in the Dar al-Tirāz of Ibn Sanā' al-Mulk.