A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature by David Tresilian Page A
Authors: David Tresilian
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also securely in the canon, the latter sounding much like Ezra Pound in calling for the ‘crushing’ of ‘Romantic sentimentality, Classical rigidity, oratorical poetry and the literature of ivory towers’ and the fashioning of a radically new poetry. 28
From the Lebanese group and mostly Levantine poets publishing in the
Shi’r
and
al-Adab
reviews, Adonis calls for special mention. This poet, impossible to summarize, sees poetry as ‘a challenge to logic … a change in the order of things, a rebellion against traditional forms and the poetic order’, pointing to the influence on him of French ideas of the
poète maudite
and the poet’s ‘revolutionary’ role, at least with regard to language. Adonis has set out his ideas in essay form, for example in his
Introduction to Arab Poetics
, 29 which argues for a ‘modernism’ in Arabic poetry that looks both to classical Arab models and to modern European, especially French, poetry. It imagines modern Arabic poetry as being in a state of permanent revolt against ‘traditionalist mentality’. A rather different poet, less obviously associated with the manifestos coming out of Beirut, is Qabbani (d. 1998), a poet who did more than most to bring the language of poetry close to the standard language, perhaps accounting for the popularity of his lyric poems and political pieces like ‘Footnotes to the Book of Defeat’, written in the wake of the 1967 war with Israel, and ‘When will the Death of the Arabs be Announced?’, a response to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. There are also Mahmoud Darwish and the Palestinian poets, whose work is discussed in Chapter 4 . 30
Your eyes are a forest of palms at dusk.
Or two balconies before the moon’s departure.
When your eyes smile the vines bring forth leaves,
And the lights dance like the moon on the river,
Trembling under the oars, softly in the dusk,
As if stars are glittering in the depths …
And then sink in a cloud of transparent sorrow
Like the sea open-handed, cloaked by night,
With winter warmth and autumn’s trembling;
Like birth and death, darkness and light.
My soul wakes to a tremulous weeping,
A wild rapture embracing the sky,
Like a child’s ecstacy when he fears the moon,
As if the arches of clouds drink in the mist
And drop by drop it melts into rain.
The children shouting in the vineyards
And the stillness of sparrows in the trees tickled by
The rainsong …
Rain
Rain
Rain.
10. From Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s poem ‘Song of the Rain’, translated by Mursi Saad El-Din
11. The Syrian poet Adonis, one of the last century’s great experimentalists
Naturally, there are far more poets than these in the post-war canon, even for the restricted period considered here. Egyptian readers, for example, brought up on the works of Egyptian poets in both theclassical and colloquial languages, such as Salah Abd al-Sabur, Ahmad Abd al-Mu’ti Hegazi and Amal Dunqul writing in the former, and Salah Jahine, Fu’ad Haddad, Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm and Abd al-Rahman al-Abnoudi in the latter, might be surprised to read one critic’s estimate 31 that despite its ‘long critical experience’ the country failed to ‘produce … a poet great enough to utilize all the knowledge gained’, unlike in the ‘poetic stronghold’ of Iraq.
In poetry, as in politics, there has long been a rivalry for leadership in the Arab world.
Occupation and Diaspora:
the Literature of Modern Palestine
Modern Palestine has given rise to a literature that is in some respects unique in the Arab world, and Palestinian writers and intellectuals have enjoyed an influence in Arab letters out of all proportion to the country’s size, matching the role that Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have played in Arab affairs since the end of the Second World War. That much at least, lifted from the introduction to this book, is well known and relatively uncontroversial. However, the
From the Lebanese group and mostly Levantine poets publishing in the
Shi’r
and
al-Adab
reviews, Adonis calls for special mention. This poet, impossible to summarize, sees poetry as ‘a challenge to logic … a change in the order of things, a rebellion against traditional forms and the poetic order’, pointing to the influence on him of French ideas of the
poète maudite
and the poet’s ‘revolutionary’ role, at least with regard to language. Adonis has set out his ideas in essay form, for example in his
Introduction to Arab Poetics
, 29 which argues for a ‘modernism’ in Arabic poetry that looks both to classical Arab models and to modern European, especially French, poetry. It imagines modern Arabic poetry as being in a state of permanent revolt against ‘traditionalist mentality’. A rather different poet, less obviously associated with the manifestos coming out of Beirut, is Qabbani (d. 1998), a poet who did more than most to bring the language of poetry close to the standard language, perhaps accounting for the popularity of his lyric poems and political pieces like ‘Footnotes to the Book of Defeat’, written in the wake of the 1967 war with Israel, and ‘When will the Death of the Arabs be Announced?’, a response to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. There are also Mahmoud Darwish and the Palestinian poets, whose work is discussed in Chapter 4 . 30
Your eyes are a forest of palms at dusk.
Or two balconies before the moon’s departure.
When your eyes smile the vines bring forth leaves,
And the lights dance like the moon on the river,
Trembling under the oars, softly in the dusk,
As if stars are glittering in the depths …
And then sink in a cloud of transparent sorrow
Like the sea open-handed, cloaked by night,
With winter warmth and autumn’s trembling;
Like birth and death, darkness and light.
My soul wakes to a tremulous weeping,
A wild rapture embracing the sky,
Like a child’s ecstacy when he fears the moon,
As if the arches of clouds drink in the mist
And drop by drop it melts into rain.
The children shouting in the vineyards
And the stillness of sparrows in the trees tickled by
The rainsong …
Rain
Rain
Rain.
10. From Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s poem ‘Song of the Rain’, translated by Mursi Saad El-Din
11. The Syrian poet Adonis, one of the last century’s great experimentalists
Naturally, there are far more poets than these in the post-war canon, even for the restricted period considered here. Egyptian readers, for example, brought up on the works of Egyptian poets in both theclassical and colloquial languages, such as Salah Abd al-Sabur, Ahmad Abd al-Mu’ti Hegazi and Amal Dunqul writing in the former, and Salah Jahine, Fu’ad Haddad, Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm and Abd al-Rahman al-Abnoudi in the latter, might be surprised to read one critic’s estimate 31 that despite its ‘long critical experience’ the country failed to ‘produce … a poet great enough to utilize all the knowledge gained’, unlike in the ‘poetic stronghold’ of Iraq.
In poetry, as in politics, there has long been a rivalry for leadership in the Arab world.
Occupation and Diaspora:
the Literature of Modern Palestine
Modern Palestine has given rise to a literature that is in some respects unique in the Arab world, and Palestinian writers and intellectuals have enjoyed an influence in Arab letters out of all proportion to the country’s size, matching the role that Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have played in Arab affairs since the end of the Second World War. That much at least, lifted from the introduction to this book, is well known and relatively uncontroversial. However, the
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