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الخيل والليل والبيداء تعرفني
والسيف والرمح والقرطاس والقلم*

’al-ĥaylu wa-l-laylu wa-l-baydā’u ta`rifunī
wa-s-sayfu wa-r-rumħu wa-l-qirŧāsu wa-l-qalamu

(Abu t-Tayyib Ahmad Ibn Hussayn al-Mutanabbi)

By general consensus, Mutanabbi is considered the greatest name in Arabic poetry, and the verse in the subtitle of my LJ his best. The English translation that my memory has kept, though I no longer remember the name of the translator, goes:

The desert knows me well, the night, the mounted men,
The spear and the sword, the paper and the pen!

(or something very similar—I'm not sure of the word spear, which if pronounced as a single syllable would ruin the scansion, but the meaning is the same. In the Arabic the word order is slightly different). This is from of a longish poem he wrote when he broke off with his sponsor.

It is this verse that caused his death, many years later. He was travelling through the desert with his son and his servant, and they were overtaken by a gang of robbers. The forces were unequal, Mutanabbi suggested they should flee, but his servant checked him. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘aren't you the one who said: …’ and he quoted the verse above. After that there could be no talk of flight. Mutanabbi looked at the servant and said: ‘You slew me!’, and then he seized his sword and went to fight the robbers; but he was killed, and his son also. (I don't know who survived to tell the tale.) The moral is that ambition is a fine thing, but it doesn't come for free.

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* Согласно другой версии: والطعن والضرب ‘и укол, и удар’, т.е. те же ‘копье и меч’. (Ну да, у каждого арабского слова четыре значения: обычное, непристойное, ‘меч’ и ‘верблюд’.)