طَرَب (ṭarab) n.: joy, pleasure, delight

Form II of this root gives the transitive verb طَرَّبَ (ṭarraba), lit. “to delight, to fill with delight … to sing.” The same root also lends itself to the dulcet genitive construct آلَة الطَرَب (ālāt at-ṭarab) lit. “instrument of pleasure, or delight,” – which is to say, a musical instrument.[1]

Odd then, to consider the additional layers of meaning Ibn Manẓūr gives in his 1290 dictionary, Lisān al-ʿArab:

الطَّرَبُ: الفَرَحُ وَالحُزْن ... وقيلَ: الطَّرَبُ خِفَّةٌ تَعْتَرِى عِنْدَ شِدَّةِ الفَرَحِ أَو الحُزْنِ وَالهَمِّ

At-ṭarab: joy and sadness ... it is said: aṭ-ṭarab is the instability that accompanies strong joy or sadness and anxiety. [2]

The pedantic and moralizing Arabist Edward Lane noted the same in his Lexicon, defining ṭarab as “a lively emotion, or excitement, agitation, or unsteadiness ... [of the heart or mind,] by reason of joy or grief.”  The translator of a whimsical but excessively Victorian and prudish edition of the Arabian Nights, Lane approvingly cited an 18th-century source in observing, “the vulgar apply it [ṭarab] peculiarly to joy.” Ours, it seems, are vulgar times, befitting vulgar, truncated expression.[3]

In contemporary Egyptian use, ṭarab loses its second short vowel but gains yet another meaning, one that is appropriately gastronomical and farcical. Here, ṭarb refers to a style of kofta (كفتى, i.e. skewered patties of minced lamb) made succulent by the strips of fat (ṭarb) pressed into it prior to grilling.

[1] Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan, fourth edition (Urbana, 1993), 649.

[2] Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab (1290), 2649

[3] Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, reprint (Beirut, 1968), I: 1835-36