Reading Arabic Literature: Back to ذا

خُبْز

root: خ-ب-ز / collective noun / definition: bread

After much anticipation, I’ve finally started my work placement with an Arabic literary magazine. I spent the day with head tucked into laptop, pausing now and then to graze on the delicious flour-free muffins I’d made at 7am and—now—I remind myself that I said I’d start sharing my recipes.

(Note: these muffins follow a mightily successful bread recipe that produced a magnificently Instagrammable result.)

Anyway, head-tucked-in-laptop, reading poetry and poetry translations, my mind lingered on a word on my screen and it brought me back to a post I wrote in 2021…

The word is found in the penultimate line of one of Saadi Youssef’s (سعدي يوسف) works, الطريق إلى البيت الكبير (The Road to the Big House), which reads:

. . .ها هوذا البيتُ الكبيرُ

I looked at that second word, هوذا, for a little too long (hoo-dhaa?—) before it clicked: هُوَذا, huwa-dhaa. Of course, especially as it’s preceded by ها.

Confused? Let’s go back.

We first looked into ذا in The ذاك Suffix, where I pointed out how ذا features in many words we’re all familiar with, like هذا، ذلك، ماذا etc.

ذا is a demonstrative pronoun, used to bring our attention to something. When standing alone, it can be translated as “this” or “that”.

Note how هذا (the word we most commonly use to mean “this”) is made up of two components: ها and ذا. Both draw our attention to something close by or in-sight.

(For more about these components, read The لِ and كَ of Distance!)

So if we go back to that line, ها هوذا البيتُ الكبيرُ, we can see both components of هذا—split up here—with the pronoun هُوَ, “it”, between them and suffixed by the latter.

So ها هوذا is a call to look: There it is!

Sometimes, we might find the ها component prefixed to the personal pronoun too. That was the case in هٰأنَذا (here I am), mentioned in the other post.

And هٰأنَذا, at my laptop before the Sun has risen, as seems to be a common occurrence throughout winter.

I’ve noticed my productivity window slowly shifting earlier with my daily 5:30am starts, and I wonder when/whether I’ll finally admit to myself that I’ve become a morning person.

Not now, in any case. I prefer my mornings deliberately slow and sleepy: mooching about in warm socks and baking Instagrammable bread.

!إلى اللقاء