Riflessioni sull'autorialità: il caso del poeta Ibn Zurayq al-Baghdadi

Several sources from XI to XVI cent. report a fine ‘ayniyya, giving versions of it which differ in length, varying from two to over forty verses. At first this poem had various attributions, or had no given author at all. It was later attributed to Abū l-Ḥasan ‘Alī ibn Zurayq al Baġdādī, a XI cent. poet from Iraq, who apparently only wrote this qaṣīda and had a troubled life with a tragic end. The little information available about him is inferable from the poem itself and the related story conveyed by some of the compilers. This paper aims to reconstruct the path of the attribution of the authorship of the ‘ayniyya. The analysis is based on the four authorial functions given by Michel Foucault and aims at balancing actual information and the legend. The main categories of the theory of cooperative reading by Eco are also used, in order to distinguish authorial, textual and critical intentions.