Names of the Lion

By Ibn Khālawayh, Translated by David Larsen Description Reviews Bio Winner of the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets Poet and scholar David Larsen’s English translation of the late 10th century Arabic lexicographer Ibn Khālawayh’s list of names of lions. Essentially a book of translation about translation, this unique work engages medieval linguistic scholarship with precision and clarity. Larsen's lively introduction, notes, and the 400 epithets are an engrossing work of cultural studies. In this remarkable work of translation and discovery David Larsen makes available to us what we can now read as a powerful old/new act of poetic naming. Not composed as poetry in the familiar sense, Ibn Khalawayh’s Names of the Lion comes alive today as a further example of Emerson’s definition of the poet as “namer and language-maker.” Larsen’s careful and groundbreaking translation, presented here in its entirety, is well worth a reading and ce