An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry 19451984 With A Critical Introduction

AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN ARABIC POETRY
1945-1984
WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
SELECTED AND TRANSLATED BY
JOHN MIKHAIL ASFOUR
THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL
NOVEMBER 1984
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

AND RESEARCH IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
John Mikhail Asfour, 1984
ABSTRACT
This study presents an Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry

from 1945 to 1984, selected and translated into English, con
taining poems by thirty-five poets who represent diverse
regions of the Arab world.
A critical introduction was de
signed to provide the Western reader with a brief overview

of the literary, cultural, and political factors which have
shaped the modernist movement in Arabic poetry of the past
four decades.
The "new poetry" is discussed in terms of form,
the expansion of mythological interest which provided a com

mon ground for the talents of the influential "Tammuzi poets,"
and the relations between politics and poetry.
Theories of
Arabic poetic modernism have been examined with reference to

modernist movements in the West which have both inspired and
repelled Arabs in the search for a contemporary poetic form
and idiom.
RESUME DE SYNTHESE
Cette etude presente une anthologie choisie de la

poesie arabe moderne de 1945
1984, traduite en anglais, et
regroupant des oeuvres de trente cinq poetes qui representent

des regions diverses du monde arabe.
Une introduction
critique offrira au lecteur occidental un survol des fac

teurs litteraires, culturels et politiques qui ont fagonne
Ie mouvement moderniste dans la poesie arabe des quatre der
nieres decades.
La "poesie nouvelle" est commentee en termes
de forme, d' elaboration des interets mythologiques qui ont

fourni un terrain commun aux influents poetes "Tammuzes," et
de relations entre politique et poesie.
Les theories du
modernisme arabe en poesie sont etudiees en rapport avec les

mouvements modernistes en Occident, mouvements qui ont
la
fois inspire et repousse les Arabes qui cherchaient un lan

gage et une forme poetiques contemporains.
For my parents, Mikhail and Milia Asfour

with love and admiration
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE:
A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
1
The Conception of the Present Study

I. Background to the Modern Period:
The Classical
Tradition in Arabic Poetry Before 1945
(a) The Nature of the Classical Arabic Poem
(b) The Need for Evolution in Poetic Conventions
11
(c) The Neoclassic and Romantic Poets
18
II. Free Verse--The Poetry of Taf'ilah

(a) The Objectives of the Free Verse Movement:
aI-shier al-hurr and aI-shier al-manthur
25
(b) Two Voices in Arabic Modernism:

'Ali Ahmad
SaCid (Adonis) and Muhammad al-Maghut
47
III. The Tammuzi Poets:
Regeneration in the Wasteland
Ca) A Growing Interest in Foreign Mythologies
63
(b) Tammuz/Adonis Rediscovered: The Influence of

T.S. Eliot on the Tammuzi Poets
72
IV. The Political Poem and the Resistance Movement
NOTES ON THE INTRODUCTION
94
112
.... /con't
(iv)
PART TWO:
AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN ARABIC POETRY, 1945-1984
Selected and Translated by John Mikhail Asfour

with Biographical Notes on the Poets.*
I. The Free Verse Movement

(a) A "Generation of Departures":
Some Early
120
Modernists
121
Nazik a1-Ma1a)ika
123
125
"When I Killed My Love"

"Let Us Dream Together"
127
Buland a1-Haydari
128
130
132
"Journey of the Yellow Letters"

"The Failure of Ancient Man"
"Waiting Sails"
134
'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati
135
137
"Broken Urns"
"a traveller without luggage"

Ilyas Abu Shabakah
140
"Evening Prayer"
141
143
Lewis cAwad
144
"Love in St. Lazare"
146
Michel Trad
147
"It's a Lie"
148
Shadhil Taqah
150
"The One-Eyed Liar"
153
- Nizar Qabbani
"Bread, Hashish, and One Moon"
"Marginal Notes on the Book of Defeat"
IIJerusa1em"
"The Dictionary for Lovers"
"Unemp1oyed ll
"Love Compared ll
"The Latest Book of Poems"
"The Nipple ll
155
159
167
169
171
172
173
174
* For ease of reference, the Biographical Notes have been

placed immediately before the poems translated by each poet.
. . ./
(v)
(I. The Free Verse Movement, can't)

(b) Explorations in Modern Forms and Idioms:
Non-Metrical Free Verse
177
Muhammad al-Maghut
"When the Words Burn"
"The Postman's Fear"
"An Arab Traveller in Space"
"Ice and Fire"
"The Orphan"
"The Dead Man"
178
179
182
183
184
186
187
Unsi aI-Hajj
"The Deep House"
"We Are Two Children"
"A Plan"
195
196
198
199
Muhammad al-Fayturi
"He Died Tomorrow"
200
201
Ahmad 'Abd al-MuCti Hijazi

"A Song of Waiting"
"We Have Nothing"
"The Lonely Woman's Room"
205
206
207
209
Sa'di Yusuf
"Six Poems"
"The Fence"
211
212
214
Khalid al-Khazraji
"Beirut, My Love"
"The Birds Are Dying of Thirst"
215
216
219
Bandar 'Abd aI-Hamid

"Suzanne"
"The Child That Was"
"The Game"
221
222
223
224
Ghada al-Samman
"Imprisonment of a Question Mark"
"Imprisonment of a Rainbow"
225
226
227
Amal Dunqul
"The Murder of the Moon"
229
230
. .. /
(vi)
II. Tammuz Rediscovered
233
(a) The Five Major "Tammuzi" Poets

Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
"River of Death"
"Christ After Crucifixion"
"Song of the Rain"
From "The Book of Job"
234
236
239
243
248
Yusuf al-Kha1
"The Eternal Dialogue"
"The Long Poem lf
Khalil
"The
"The
"The
250
252
256
Hawi
Cave"
Magi in Europe"
Prisoner"
263
265
269
272
Adonis ('Ali Ahmad Sacid)

"The New Noah"
"A Dialogue"
"The Fall"
"The Language of Sin"
"The Road"
If A Vision"
If The Crow's Feather"
If A Mirror of
the Stone"
"The Days of the Hawk"
275
277
280
281
282
283
284
287
290
292
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

"Beyond Galilee"
"The Poet and Women"
"The City"
301
303
304
307
(b) In The Tammuzi Tradition
314
Salah 'Abd al-Sabur

liThe Saint"
"Song for Winter"
315
317
320
Salem Haqqi
"Sinbad's Last Journey"
322
Isam Mahfuz
326
"A Birth"
327
323
Riyad Najib al-Rayyis

"Night in the Reeling Tent"
329
330
... /
(vii)
~
III. Resistance Poetry

Mahmud Darwish
"To the Reader"
"Soft Rain in a Distant Autumn"
"Of Poetry"
"The Prison"
"The Curtain Falls"
"Promises with the Storm"
IIIdentity Card ll
333
334
336
337
339
341
342
344
345
Samih al-Qasim
"Come, Together We Shall Draw a Rainbow ll
"I Love You as Death Wishes"
"Fear"
"A Speech in the Unemployment Market"
"So"
"Descent II
"The Eucharist of Failure"
348
Fadwa Tuqan
liThe Rock"
364
349
354
355
357
359
360
362
365
(Izz al-Din al-Manasira

"Passport"
369
MuCin Basisu
"A Traffic Lightll
"To a Lady Tourist"
372
Sadiq al-Sa~igh
IIA Spectacle"
IIDryads"
"Fingers of the Night"
Kamal Nasir
"The Leaders of My Country"
Tawfiq Zayyad
"Six Words"
Tawfiq Sayigh
"Out of the Depths Have I Cried to
Thee, 0 Death"
BIBLIOGRAPHY
370
373
374
376
377
378
379
382
383
385
386
389
391
400
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank a number of persons whose kind

assistance made this work possible.
For their advice and
encouragement, special thanks are due to Professors Louis

Dudek and Harry Anderson of the English Department at McGill
University, and to Professors Issa J. Boullata and Charles
J. Adams of the Islamic Institute at McGill.
As my thesis
supervisor, Professor Dudek has been a constant source of

stimulation and support.
I would like to thank my wife,
Alison Burch, for giving of her time and herself in helping

to research, edit, and prepare the manuscript.
My brothers,
sister, and parents have assisted and encouraged me, espe

cially my father, who for three years diligently recorded
onto tape all the Arabic texts for me, with immense patience.
Mrs. Katherine Newman gave countless hours to tape books,
take dictation, and type much of the preliminary material.
Mrs. Bea Kemp and Miss Rebecca Montroy have similarly contri
buted their time over the past few years.
The efficient
librarians at McGill University, both in McLennan Library

and the Library of the Islamic Institute, must be thanked-
especially Mr. Emil Wahbah, whose cheerful and unflagging help
in hunting down elusive information far exceeded the line of
duty.
Mr. Bernard Queenan of Concordia University has always
been ready to give helpful suggestions and criticism, often

bringing light to bear upon a problem from one of his wide
. ../
(ix)
(Acknowledgements, con't)
ranging areas of expertise.

Finally, I thank The Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada for providing a doctoral grant
during the final year of my candidacy, and The Roothbert
Fund, Inc. of New York for a bursary which enabled me to
procure Arabic books unavailable in Canada.
PART ONE:
A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
The Conception_of the Present Study

No longer predominantly romantic or traditionalist,
no longer exclusively patriotic or partisan, no longer
closed to foreign influences and literary currents, Arabic
poetry within the past forty years has decisively preci
pitated itself into the modern age.
It has undergone an
accelerated movement comparable to, and in part sparked

by, Western literary developments in the 1920's and 1930's.
Nevertheless, it has retained its distinctive character and
concerns, given a broader scope for expression in a
blossoming of new forms.
The dominant, highly stylized form of the qasida, or
ode, was first rendered accessible to change by poets
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala)ika and Khalil Hawi,
who, in the late 1940's, broke down its traditional meter
to experiment with the poetic foot (taf'ilah) itself,
freed from the dictates of a set pattern.
The subsequent
period of modernization has been painful as well as

exciting; social and political problems, as well as prob
lems of literary theory, have given rise to debate among
the many "schools" and individuals contributing their
talents to the still controversial cause of modernism.
Besides offering an account of the technical and theore
tical advances and points of contention among the poets

represented in this anthology, an appreciation of their
accomplishments through a panoramic view of their situa
tion in modern Arabic society is the object of this
introduction.
An overview of the political, religious,
and cultural realities which weigh most heavily in the

poet's mind will be presented, and some of the major indi
vidual contributions, stylistic and thematic, will be con
sidered in this connection.
Biographical notes sketching
the career of each of the thirty-five poets have been

incorporated with the translations in order to provide
essential information on each poet and to include
as much
as possible the critical pOints of reference for his or her

work.
It is a selection of modern Arabic poetry from a cri
tical perspective, and the reasons why each poet is included

and what phase of Arabic poetry he may illustrate is indica
ted in these notes.
The present critical introduction is divided into three
major sections, the first intended to acquaint the Western
reader with the movements and events in Arabic literature
which constitute a necessary background to the modern period,
and the remaining
two to shed light on the major cate
gories into which the poetry of this anthology seemed natu

rally to fall.
These categories--poetry of the "Free Verse
Movement," the "Tammuzi" group, and of the Palestinian
"Resistance" poets, provide a useful frame of reference, but

should not in any way be regarded as mutually exclusive, inde
pendent
movements.
In fact, an intermixture of influences
is to be observed everywhere in the modern Arabic literary

world.
Thus Sayyab, one of the engineers of the free verse
movement, is discussed in the present work primarily for

his seminal influence on the Tammuzi group of poets, while
Adonis, another of the leading Tammuzis, is discussed for
his metrical innovations in the section dealing with the
free verse movement.
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra is both a Pales
tinian and member of the original Tammuzi group; I
have
found it appropriate to review his contribution in the

latter group, as his poetry is not confined by the specific
interests of the Resistance movement, but addresses, as Taw
fiq Sayigh's does, more universal themes.
I.
Background to the Modern Period:
The Classical
Tradition in Arabic Poetry Before 1945

(a)
The Nature of the Classical Arabic Poem
Commanding a new range of symbols and allusions, as

well as forms, modern Arabic poetry is the result of long
deliberation over the need for change.
From the middle
of this century, movements in Arabic poetry have questioned

the suitability of predetermined metrical forms as well as
the approved content of the old poem, which had remained
virtually unchanged from the period before Islam to
the twentieth century.
Descriptive, emotional, declama
tory and grandiose in style, the classical poem was the

cherished heirloom of the Arabic literary heritage.
Treat
ing the time-honoured themes of love and death, courage,

war, God and nature, it had followed a great tradition.
The classical poem, omnipresent in Arabic culture and
education, is still deeply imprinted on the literary
consciousness, and until the 1960's the fact remained that,
no matter what his stature as a writer of free verse, a
poet who had not demonstrated his ability to write a
satisfactory poem in the classical style was sure to be
slighted for his apparent inability to emulate the old
masters.
From a study of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry,
al-Khalil (d. 786) defined the acceptable sixteen meters
of Arabic verse, organizing previously unwritten rules

into a coherent prosodic system, with some original
combinations of his own.
Each of the sixteen meters
dictates a line length which will be unvaried throughout

the poem.
The line itself, divided into two balanced
parts, or
hemistichs--the first the sadr,
the second
(ajuz--is the basis of the musical unity of the traditional

poem, each hemistich being further divided into an equal
number of syllables and accents.
Patterned repetitions
of these syllables and accents compose the poetic foot,

taf'ilah.
The rhyme completes a musical unit at the end
of each line, and plays a significant role in sustaining

the music from one line to another.
In some cases, the
rhyme serves as a binding agent in the completion of an

idea.
Within one hemistich, a taf(ilah could be shortened
by a single accent to allow a certain flexibility in compo
sition.
Variations of the sixteen basic meters could be
produced by shortening the number of
taf~ilahs
in each
hemistich, from four to three, for example, or from three

to two.
Each meter was given a name to designate its
nature:
al-kamil, "the perfect," for its satisfying
equilibrium; al-khabab, "soft trot," for its galloping

rhythm; or al-rajaz, "trembling in camels' knees,"
jocularly known as the donkey of meters, as any poet may
ride comfortably on its back.
A regular line in the simplest
meter, al-rajaz, contains six identical poetic feet repre

sen ted by the nonsense word, mustafCilun.
Catalectic changes
frequently occur. In the rhyming foot of the 'ajuz and the

last in the sadr, the final syllable may be dropped--to
satisfy grammatical or euphonic purposes, for instance:
( <a.juZ)
(sadr)
mustaf'iltn1
mustaf c iltn1
mustaf'iltn1
mustaf<: il
mustaf ~ iltn1
mustaf <; il.
Al-khabab, one of the most complex meters, has eight

feet:
('ajuz)
To this accentual pattern it is much more difficult to

fit words.
A line in a well-anthologized twelfth century
poem by al-Husri al-Qayrawani ("Ya Laylu, s-Sabbu ll ) written

in al-khabab exhibits the permissible use of feet shor
tened intermittently by an accent, from fa<ilun to fa(lun:
Ya laylu, s-sabbu mata ghaduhu
L..J-.
fa'lun
--"'-
fa(lun
fa~ilun fa'ilun
"[Oh night; when is the lover's tomorrow?
Is it the hour of
judgement?]
The first, second, and sixth feet happen to be shortened

in this particular line, the second and sixth in the
succeeding line, the second, fifth and sixth in the next,
and so forth.
~safu~il-ba~ ur~duhu)
facilun
fa'lun
fa(ilun
fa(ilun
facilun
fa'lun
falUun
fa'ilun
[Night-companions slept, but the sadness of death kept him

wakeful]
labaka~ ..n-naimu wara~ahu )
fa(ilun
fa(lun
fa'ilun
mimma yarCahu wayarsuduhu
fa(ilun
[For him a star wept, tender for what ailed and hypno
tized him.l
elifu~ighaz.3t..in dh~ayaf i~
facilun
fa(ilun
fa'lun
fa'ilun
~hawfu ~ash~a yush~iduhu
fa'lun
fa'lun
fa(ilun
fa<ilun
[In love with a lithe and beautiful deer, he runs from his
enviers]
[In sleep my eyes set a net for him--but he was difficult
to catch.]
fa'ilun
fa ~lun fa'ilun fa< ilun fa'ilun
fa'lun fa'ilun fa'ilun
[An erect statue of beauty he is; I love, but do not worship

him. ]
~ahin~alkh~ru jana~famih~
fa'lun fa'lun fa'ilun
fa'ilun
sakranu 'l-lahzi mucarbiduhu
.A-.
-.A........
fa'lun fa~lun facilun
:..J
fa'ilun
[Awake, wine is the fruit of his mouth; his boisterous

lover has drunken glances.]
~Ali
The Egyptian poet of the present century,
Mahmud Taha (1902-l949), is notable for his superb command

of the traditional meters.
A few lines from his poem,
"Layali Kiliubatra" [The Nights of Cleopatra]
illustrate
the smooth musical balance of the ramal ("quick walk") meter,

which lends itself well to the singing voice.
Strictly
speaking, in the ramal meter each hemistich contains three

tafCilah's: fa'ilatun fa'ilatun fa (ilatun, where a foot
may be altered by an accent or syllable to fa<ilatun or
-c
ilun.
In the fashion of Arab romantic poets of the
fa
period, Taha has availed himself of a certain prosodic
license in this poem, shortening the line by two tafCilah's
and arranging the poem in quatrains and couplets with
differing end-rhymes, rather than in the two-hemistich
line with
the traditional monorhyme (gafiyah):
~u~ithat f~wraqin mu~~lhamin min~lli fann~
fa'ilatun
fa(ilatun
faCilatun
fa'ilatun
[She was sent forth in a boat inspired by all the arts,]
~arihi'l-mi~fi yakh~ bihaw~ tughan~

fa(ilatun
[The joyous oar singing with lyric beauty]
~a habibi~dhihil~tu
fa (ilatun
fa~ilatun
hubbiJ
fa'ilatun
[My darling, this is the night of my lovei]
~Ahi law s~tani
)~a qalbi!.."
[Would that you shared my heart's joy!]
~yluna kha~n wa)ashw~n tughanni~wlana)
fa'ilatun
fa(ilatun
fa'ilatun
fa'ilun
[Ours is a night of 'wine and longing, which sing all
around us]
~ashira(u~abihun fi nA?uri yarCa~llan~
fa'ilatun
fitilatun
fi(ilatun
fa'ilun
[And there is a boat swimming in the light to guard our
10
shadows. ]
~na fi allaW. sakar~a~afaq~ublanc:.,
[The night harboured others drunk with beauty, who

awoke before us.]
~ytahum qu~arafu alh~ fabatu~ithlana:.,
[Would that they knew love, and were like us!]
As may be ascertained from this very brief illustra

tion, the formal qualities of traditional Arabic verse
are demanding indeed, despite the licence afforded by
divisions and subdivisions of the meter.
The aesthetic
requirements of symmetry in form and roundness of expres

sion discourage any attempt to release the poetic idiom
from its stilted and slightly archaic elegance.
The diffi
culty of expressing the mercurial quality of twentieth

century experience within such constraints is obvious.
But
equally obvious is the fact that a poetry only recently

emerging from so strong a classical tradition into a state
of experimentation will not entirely abandon its formal
character, or develop according to the same principles
that modern Western movements have espoused.
11
(b) The Need for Evolution in Poetic Conventions

The classical Arabic poem is emotionally charged,
having its origins in a popular oral tradition and preser
ving the primary influences of music, story and song
beneath the linguistic embellishments and metrical sophis
tication it acquired over the centuries.
But the modern
poet is aware of its intellectual inadequacies in a sophis

ticated scientific age.
This new facet of the poem--a
concentration of ideas--is studied carefully by the modern

Arab
poet
and creatively introduced for two basic reasons:
mainly to heighten pleasure, and secondly to educate.

Sa~idal-Waraqi
As
comments, the new breed of poets aims to
merge the collective and personal experience in their

poetry of contemporary life.
To do so, it is necessary
to evaluate their heritage, deciding what is truly worthy

of preservation and what new material should most urgently
be admitted.
Thus the mid-twentieth century Arab
poet
"took a fresh look at his heritage and history in the light

of present-day knowledge, after he realized that the
only effective thing in any heritage is its spiritual
and human values"--and, without disregard to these values,
it was quite possible to make such innovations as would
enable them to "recognize all elements of the human drama.,,2
A concern with discovering universal meanings, beyond
12
those directly relevant to oneself and one's society,

is the natural extension of an unlocked intellectual
curiosity.
poet has grown pain
Consequently, the modern Arab
fully aware that much classical poetry abounds with terms

that contribute little to the meaning of the poem--terms
demanded by the meter, which must be stripped away if the
poem is to be tautened and updated.
Another persistent
impediment is the hangover of various forms of traditional

natural description which no longer serve as an organic
part of the poem.
Many of the modern
Arab
poets must
battle a lingering tendency to describe an object without

revealing its essence or its relevance.
Modernists of
the calibre of cAli Ahmad Sa'id ("Adonis"), Badr Shakir

al-Sayyab, Tawfiq Sayigh and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra are among
the most notable exceptions in this regard.
Shedding rigid
concepts of rhyme, meter, and form, they also realize

that their rebellion is incomplete until the "descriptive
hangover" has also been routed.
writes Jabra:
Today's poet is keen to unite his line in meaning

and structure; he has abandoned the vertical
structure which depended on various images joined
only by meter, circumstance, and oral tradition,
and which extended as long as the poet's breath
lasted. But today's poet integrates the parts of
his poem according to a central meaning .. He
is wary of the ringing and the exalted style,
'seeing in both a laughable, artificial quality.
Grandiloquence has no attraction for him in an age
loud with words, when he feels the great human
loneliness. 3
13
Consequently, says Jabra, the modern poet does not abide

by the laws of meter, that "old, tough dictator," but now
lets the prosody work for him to enhance the poem's music,
sharpen its feelings, and intensify its images.
The new
poem avoids the lazy rhythm, as well as the exhaustive

rhyme traditionally terminating each line.
Emphasis has shifted from the niceties of form and

eloquence of statement to the aptness of form and impor
tance of statement.
In this, European and American lite
rary movements have contributed seminal ideas for moderni

zation.
But, while it is desirable to be versed in foreign
issues and ideas, it is widely felt among Arab poets that

these should not constitute the lifeblood of the poem,
nor should poetry become derivative of other cultures
and alienated from its native ground.
One of the most
prolific and successful poets of the Arab world, Nizar

Qabbani, argues the tragedy of transplanting Western
problems along with Western modes of thought into a society
greatly in need of reassessing the nature of its own
response to more native problems.
He is convinced that
existentialism, for example, is not a viable literary

reflection of the Arab individual's
sense of alienation
and confused purpose:

In my opinion the problem of futility, nothing
ness, uselessness, is an imported psychological
14
problem that has its justification in the tired

European civilization, yet we have transported
it freely, even when it did not have a place in
our lives. The sense of hopelessness which is
imposed on our literary heritage is not Arabic;
it was made in France, and we have imported its
contagious crimes. S
The object of the modern
Arab
poet is to produce a
poem that appears to be written for its own sake, fresh,

vital, and responsive to the spirit of the age.
It should
not merely reflect or describe the age, but rather in

its interpretation of reality contribute something to it.
In the past the Arabic poem has been much confined to
its region, expressing personal joy and grief, addressing
the religious and political concerns of community and
country, and voicing a highly emotional response to any
given conflict which arises.
In "Of Poetry," the contem
porary poet Mahmud Darwish depicts the limitations of such

a poetry, drugged by the influence of Omar Khayyam's rhythmi
cal sentiment, and Oblivious to the needs of the present. 6
A poem, suggests Darwish, should do more than "please
those who love me / And anger my enemiesll--objects of the
classical qasida.
Modern Arabic poetry attempts to
broaden its experience, surpass its formerly regional char

acter and attain universal significance.
Frustration with classical rigidity does not begin
with the twentieth century modernists.
It begins as far
back as the second century of Islam, when Abu Nuwas
15
(ca 757-815) considered it was time to cease the manda

tory weeping over the ruins and praising of one's camel
and introduce other prefatory subject matter--extolling
the vintage of a wine, for instance, or a treatment of
the problems of urban living.
Abu Nuwas's objection to
the traditional opening was practical:
he saw no reason
to commence by standing among the desolate ruins, when the

Arabs had moved from their little tribes to cities like
Baghdad and Damascus.
He is thus known as the first Arab
to call for an adjustment of poetry to a changing environ

ment, and to the poet's own purposes, whether satirical,
elegiac, or panegyric.
In the same epoch, Abu Tammaro (d. ca. 845) also became
dissatisfied with the traditional forms of the classical
poem.
He, like Abu Nuwas, eliminated entirely the tradi
tonal weeping over the ruins and praise of the camel to

enter his poems directly without introduction or preamble.
The contemporary poet Adonis discovers in Abu Tammam's
word-play a "modernism" of a very high order--a poetic
language that had never been heard before, where the
uncommon usage and the meaning of words were alike sources
of beauty.
Summarizing Abu Tammam's innovations, Adonis
is impressed by four salient characteristics of his style:

1) He used words to indicate more than one
meaning, stripping them of their familiar meanings
16
and delivering absolutism over to the realm

of probabilities. This accounted for a divi
sion among his readers, leading to many discre
pant interpretations of his poetry.
2) He changed the familiar order of syntax, and
hence he was accused of excessive complexity.
3) He omitted points of detail, without leaving
clues as to the nature of the omissions. As a
result, he was accused of being "difficult" and
lIobscure."
4) He created hidden meanings, unfamiliar con
structions, and strange logical connections. 7
Abu Tammam subjected the poetry of his predecessors to the
most thorough interrogation it had undergone to date.
From his example numerous modern poets of the twentieth
century have taken heart, finding in the Golden Age of
the classical tradition an advocate of their belief that
poets who content themselves with imitating what has
succeeded in the past clip the wings of their creativity.
One would expect that poetry should have developed
and changed due to the influence of Abu Nuwas, Abu Tammam,
Bashshar ibn-Burd (d. 783), and later with a1-Mutannabi
(915-965) and Abu a1-'A1a) a1-Ma carri (973-1057)
but
however much these isolated figures were admired, no

schools of poetry sprang up under their banners.
Abu
Nuwas's attempt to begin the poem in praise of wine was

ultimately not a significant event in the evolution of
Arabic poetry; and neither he nor Abu Tammam ventured
17
further to effect broad changes in poetic form.
What
changes they did effect were subsequently incorporated into

the poetry of al-Mutanabbi and al-Ma'arri at the height
of the classical period.
The Arabic poem was crystal
lized then, and remained as Abu Nuwas and Abu Tammam had
left it, laden with its traditional meter and rhyme
schemes.
Few poets following them ventured to buiId upon
their singular achievements, to rescue the poem from

stagnation and make it serviceable to their own age and
environment.
The classical poem survived, its influence virtually
unshaken throughout the centuries, because the Arabs con
sidered it--and still do--a magnificent bulwark of their
civilization, the apex of linguistic creativity in a
language whose great complexity allows endless scope for
fresh exploitation of the set forms.
It is unfortunate
that an appreciation of this heritage seemed to preclude

the welcoming of co-existent, innovative streams.
Perhaps
no major innovative movements arose due to the severe

constrictions on cultural and artistic independence which
are to be noted throughout
Arab
history.
Just as the
Arab world lived for centuries under the supervision of

one colonizer or another, so did its literature; in fact,
the deterioration of that literature over the centuries
subsequent to the fall of the Abbasid empire (749-1258 A.D.)
is drastic.
18
(c) The Neoclassic and Romantic Poets
The latter half of the nineteenth century and the
early part of the twentieth saw a group of poets whose
task was to refurbish that literature and usher in a new
age of renaissance.
Mahmud Sami al-Barudi (1839-1904),
Hafiz Ibrahim (1871-1932) and Ahmad Shawqi (1868-1932) were

three Egyptian poets who tried to bring the Arabic poem out
of its long sleep and restore the grandeur of the early
classical tradition.
Modelling their talents after the
sublime technical expertise of the great classical poets,

they succeeded in injecting new vigour and dignity into
the decayed tradition.
The restorative art of these neoclas
sicists was not, however, a profoundly innovative art, and

cannot be said to have contributed significantly to the
evolution of the modern poem.
Other schools of poetry and
individual poets inherited the task of technical advance

ment in the 1920's and 1930's, yet their attempt to break
away was thwarted by a retrospective brand of romanticism, a
tendency to verbosity, and a final reluctance to tamper
with the traditional poem.
But while the poetry of Shawqi and his contemporaries
addressed itself to panegyric, elegies, political and social
celebrations, the later romantic poetry of 'Abbas Mahmud al
tAqqad (1889-1964),
Ibrahim al-Mazini (1890-1949) and
'Abd aI-Rahman Shukri (1886-1958), who together formed the

Diwan school, did introduce a significant new element to
19
Arabic poetry in the decades preceding the 1940's.
This
contribution was a new seriousness of subject, depicting

the drama of human experience with intelligence and sensi
tivity, with a notable absence of the usual clever and mecha
nical structure.
The interest these poets felt in renewing
poetry was joined with a keen understanding of human tra

gedy, and of man's relationship with nature and with God.
This poetry was ruminative and descriptive, and only
mildly daring in its prosodic experimentation.
For exam
ple, one stanza of a love poem by al-CAqqad translates

roughly as:
Such a mouth,
Such lips,
Such a honeycomb in it
That I would devour-
Such flowers in it
That I would pluck-
Beautiful, woeful
Like a lovely garden:
My sorrow pains me
After her. 8
A more modern poem treating a comparable love theme, such

as Qabbani's "Unemployed"
(1981) might to a degree use
the same romantic language:

If I hadn't encountered your lovely face
I wouldn't have been a writer of poems
If I hadn't kissed you from head to foot

The world, my love, wouldn't have known the
history of kisses
20
If I hadn't drawn your beautiful body in my poems

The children would never have known the shape of
the honeycomb
If I hadn't worked as a farmer
In the field of your eyes, I would have been
unemployed
(p. 171)
But here an ironic element is apt to rescue it from cliche,
as the incongruous terms, "farming" and I'"unemployment" play
havoc with the traditional love imagery.
Rhythmically, Qabbani's poems contain a
simila~
element
of surprise, while the rhythmic pattern of al-'Aqqad's poem

is as predictable as its imagery_
The lines by al-CAqqad
quoted above are, indeed, mellifluous in Arabic, the same

taf~ilah being repeated twice in each line.
The repetition
does not at first sound awkward to the ear, but soon

becomes monotonous, as the taf'ilah chosen and thus repeated
is a very simple one.
It takes the form of facilun facilun
the whole poem is composed solely of these two feet, six

syllables to the line with a rhyme scheme running ABAB.
The prosodic changes introduced by al-CAqqad and the
Diwan school consisted of dividing the traditional meter
into a shorter one by employing two taf(ilah's instead of
three, or three instead of four in a single line.
They
also were interested in quatrains and quintains simply

because this new form would, in their estimation, vary
the symmetry of the meter and decrease the monotony of
the rhyme scheme, which they occasionally discarded.
21
Inspired by the leading romantic poet, Khalil Mutran

(1872-1949), the Diwan school developed the musical element
in the poem sometimes by substituting couplets or triplets
for a more complicated rhyme scheme, and sometimes by
dispensing with the traditional two-hemistich line.
Shukri
conducted the most extensive experiments with unrhymed

verse; but ultimately, like his fellows, he shared the
conviction that poetry need not divorce itself from its
traditional sources of musicality in order to depict "real"
human experience:
it need only modify and vary them to
a degree of greater flexibility.

Contemporaneous with the Diwan movement were those
of the Mahjar (expatriate) poets in the Americas and the
"Apollo" school in Egypt, with marginal differences in
poetic
theory from one poet to the next, generally depen
ding on geographical location and the specific spheres

of influence to which they were receptive.
Like the
Diwan school, these poets were unhappy with the stringent

traditional forms and the chant-like quality pervading
Arabic poetry due to the predictable rhyme schemes and
drumming rhythms of the "music."
Largely impervious to
more immediate developments in western culture, they per

ceived that English romantic poetry had, at least, developed
a language of its own, and they began to pay attention to
the criticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge-around the time
22
that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were transforming literary

theory in the west.
Both the Diwan and Mahjar schools
became pioneers in the introduction of a new strain of

romanticism to Arabic poetry, with a loosening of form
and broadened range of imagery.
While the Diwan school
called for the same changes as the Mahjar school abroad,

a number of poets belonging to the latter--Mikhail NuCaymah
(b. 1889), Iliya Abu Madi (1890-1957), and Khalil Gibran
(1883-1931), for instance--were more organized and energe
tic in their efforts, and came to represent romantic poetry
more successfully.
The Mahjar poets benefited from a certain detachment,
a more objective view of their native land, together with
the habits and traditions which had shaped their thinking.
Their romanticism was charged emotionally and intellectu
ally with fresh ideas and sentiments.
Migration seemingly
provided them with a stronger impulse towards renewal,

inspiring them to refresh their poetry with the longawaited "new imagery," and aim for a certain organic
completion previously lacking in their poetry.
however, as
In the main,
'?\bd aI-Qadir al-Qit observes, the Mahjar
poets were keen and skillful critics, introducing nume

rous innovative theories in their books yet unable to
transport these theories into their own poetry.9
Their
experiments with poetic form remain an uneven attempt, not
23
a material achievement in the interests of modernism.

In one of his poems, the Lebanese-born Mahjar poet, Fawzi
al-Macluf (1899-1930), who attained considerable recogni
tion in Brazil, writes:
Leave to the Bedouin life the sword and the spear,
And to the pre-Islamic age, camels and tents;
Past ages have passed; why do we
Live in them, grope in their shadows?
Shall the age of enlightenment yield to our logic
While we continue to gather relics of the past?
What does it benefit poetry, if a poet stands
on the ruins
Weeping about how they rose, and how they fell?
If there were no ruins, he would still lament
To suit the age-old desert custom.
Leave off these old traditions, destroy
Their shrines and smash their idols!lO
It is noteable that in form the poem meets every classical
requirement, conforming to the a1-kamil meter (mutafa'ilun,
mutafa ci1un, mutafa c i1un) with a two-hemistich line in the
unified rhyme scheme.
The major contribution of Arab poets in the first
half of the twentieth century was in the attempt to
modernize the structure and contents of the poem, not its
form.
Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi (1892-1955), for instance, foun
der of both the Apollo Society and Apollo magazine in 1932

(though forced to fold in 1934, the magazine attracted the
talents of Taha, Abu a1-Qasim al-Shabbi and Ibrahim Naji)
spoke of the rejection of the monorhyme scheme, but soon
abandoned the experiment to concentrate on other issues of
24
poetic reform:
primarily the integration of structure,
theme, and internal music.
He and the other Apollans, like
a1- CAqqad and his fellow poets in the Diwan group, believed
that the poem's special "music" should carry its psychologi
cal and philosophical undercurrents, and that the meter and
rhyme scheme chosen should compliment the contents and
emotional impact of the poem.
The sum of these cautious innovations in Arabic verse
did serve to provide poets in the first half of the twen
tieth century with an increasing conviction that effective
changes could, indeed, be made, without disrespect to the
achievements of their literary forefathers.
By the late
1940's a series of influential new magazines had appeared

in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad, which encouraged
the exploration of poetic form, and the Arabic poem next
became the field in which a succession of broader attempts
were made to extend, rather than simply reiterate, the
tradition.
II.
Free Verse--The Poetry of Tafcilah

(a) The Objectives of the Free Verse Movement:
aI-shier al-hurr and aI-shier al-manthur
There are many conflicting theories as to which of
the modern Arab poets pioneered the free verse movement

(aI-shier al-hurr: literally, "free poetry") which burgeoned
in progressive literary circles of the late 1940's.
Some
attribute the earliest use of the form to the Egyptian

initiator of the Apollo group, Abu Shadi:
11
some to Lewis
cAwad in his book, Plutoland and Other Poems (Cairo, 1947):

yet others to the Iraqi poets, al-Sayyab and al-Mala>ika,
whose first published and highly celebrated instances of
free verse appeared in
Dece~er
1947.
A number of other
poets, Badawi, for instance, and al-Khal, claim to have been

experimenting privately with the form at the same time, and
to have published earlier specimens of this work subsequently,
when a more receptive audience could be found.
12
But if
critics dispute the origins of the free verse movement, they

agree that among Arab
po~t~
there grew,
dun~ng
the 1940's,
a widespread dissatisfaction with conventional concepts of

poetic decorum, which imposed constraints upon the poem's
intellectual and thematic content and hindered the poet
from bringing the full range of his religious, scientific
and philosophical experience to bear upon his work.
The nature of Arabic modernism, the pressing need
for it, and all the possible attendant dangers had been.
26
discussed long before it actually manifested itself in

Arabic literature.
The neoclassicist, Ahmad Shawqi, had spo
ken of the need for modernization in the late nineteenth cen

tury--and yet persisted in writing what was, essentially,
traditional poetry par excellence.
Leaders of succeeding
movements, like al-CAqqad, offered apologies for a diluted

modernism designed to reassure readers, rather than bestir
them.
AI-(Aqqad explains that modernism

does not mean denial of the Arabic tradition, or
doing away with Arabic literary methods; modernism
does discard the illusion that the achievements
of that literature must be credited to the
Arabs alone, or to those who have styled them
selves after the fourth century of the Hijra.
Modernism does not mean the description of
modern inventions and signs of civilization. It
rests more in the way in which a thing is des
cribed than in what is described. Modernism does
not entail hanging on the judgements of newpapers
in political and social matters . It does not
mean shunning the traditions of the Arabs to
adopt western traditions. Westerners may perpe
trate mistaken concepts of literature as well as
Easterners. Modernism does not demand acceptance
of the meanings, ideas and methods of a poet, nor
does it depend on the poet's intentions or his
shortcomings; it consists of a man's discovery
within himself of what he feels and has to say, 13
and that it is worthy of him to say and feel it.
It is difficult to quarrel with a modernism which approves

a man's inner discoveries, and promotes freedom and authen
ticity of speech.
In practice, neither al-CAqqad nor his
followers availed themselves of a particularly broad

thematic licence, or strayed far onto unconventional
27
grounds in their quest for a "new poetry."
While al
(Aqqad evinces a genuine, if somewhat hazy concern for

poetic reform, he broaches no very alarming or very
material changes to be acted upon.
It remained the part of poet/critics of the next
generation, such as al-Mala>ika, Yusuf al-Khal, Buland
al-Haydari, Adonis, Khalil Hawi and Jabra to articulate
the need for modernism in more concrete terms and to assi
milate these theories more convincingly in their poetry.
Such modern poetry magazines as Shier (founded by Adonis
and al-Khal in 1957, and continuing with a three-year inter
ruption till 1969) and al-Adab (1953 to the present, boas
ting al-Mala'ika and Qabbani among its regular contributors)
provided the most prestigious outlets for experimental
poetry, criticism, and reviews, as well as translations of
foreign poets, becoming instrumental both in developing
and gaining credibility for the more flexible new forms.
In the first extensive and sophisticated critical treat
ment,
al-Mala~ika
attempted to outline the ground rules
for acceptable innovations in the new forms, besides

conducting an ambitious evaluation of her contemporaries
in the rising movement.
But we may look to Nizar Qabbani
for the most vivid rationale of the
new movement.
Qabbani ceased writing conventional verse in the mid

fifties, complaining that
28
Despite all of its enchantment and rich heri

tage, the traditional rhyme is a dead end where
the imagination of the poet stands panting, the
red light which screams "STOP!" when he is at
the summit of his excitement and momentum. It
takes away his wind, de-fuels him, and forces
him to begin the round anew, which means re-en
tering a period of awakening after each jolt, or
prosaic relapse. When the jolts are repeated
the verses of the poem become separate worlds,
or different, disconnected stories in a lofty
building. 14
Advocating at this point that the sixteen meters of
Arabic poetry, established more than a thousand years ago
by al-Khalil, might yet be used "as a base or starting
point in the development of new musical schemes,u15
Qabbani later propounded quite another theory as to what
constitutes musicality in a poem.
Describing the revolu
tionary achievements of free verse and other modernist

movements by 1973, he rejoices that
the modern poem has been freed from the algebra
of its music, from the absolutism of the Khalili
meters, and the paganism of the monorhyme scheme.
The music of this poetry comes from the act of
writing itself, and from the continuous labour
and adventure in the linguistic and personal
unknown. 16
This pioneering spirit in twentieth century Arab
poets is not a total plunge into the unknown, or a defi
nitive divorce from tradition in favour of Westernized
forms of free verse.
The latter is considered prose
poetry with line breaks, known as al-shi'r al-manthur,
29
as opposed to the more widely favoured metrical free verse

which we have spoken of, aI-shier al-hurr.
Even such advo
cates of the freer form (aI-shier al-manthur) as Yusuf alKhal, stress the necessity of retaining musical and
rhythmical elements in poetry, and, while affirming that
"modernism in poetry means creativity, and the escape from
precedent,"
do not by any means disparage the precedents
in question. l
In fact, al-Khal asserts that modernism
"has no relationship to any particular time....

and 'traditional' poets co-exist in any period."
vertical poetry with balanced hemistichs
'Modern'
The
"is characterized
by poetic features that came to poetry in one period of

its development, and in our developing views of life and
its significance," adapted by modernists like Abu Nuwas
and Abu Tammam to reply to the needs of another age.
The problem is that these features "became immutable rules
for the traditionalists, and an obstacle to change and
development for the creative modernists" of our own age.
18
The present widespread dissatisfaction and rebellion

in Arabic poetry is often conceived of as a seed planted
by the more innovative classical poets in a barren land,
a seed which has slept for centuries and now has burst
into life allover the Arab world.
Where this occurs,
perfection in form gives way to a conception of poetry as

a living thing, taking on the shape or form suggested by
30
the poet's perception of reality rather than forcibly

shaping life to a preconceived art-form.
A new concern
with economy of expression, influenced strongly by the

British and American imagists, accompanies the search for
forms appropriate to subject matter and artistic purpose.
As yet, only a relative few have succeeded in concen
trating the poem to the degree of directness Ezra Pound
urged.
Few, too, have engineered in their poetry Pound's
genuine "musical phrase."
However, the Arabic poem had
never, previous to the 1950's, been much concerned with

the variation of its musical structure.
unified "music"
It possessed a
pre-ordained by meter and rhyme, not
necessarily, as we have noted, finely tuned to the psycho

logical or philosophical undertones of the poem, until
the early 1930's
when Abu Shadi, al-'Aqqad, Naji and
their followers took pains to mend this deficiency.

But with the decline of the traditional rhyme and meter,
the musical consistency of the poem was altered.
Not only
did the poet-shape his poems according to these psycholo

gical and philosophical needs, but he began to end his
lines wherever he felt the sense required.
So far from
being ascertainable by a glance at the page, the music of

the new poem is usually not apparent until read aloud.
If
it has lost in mesmeric effect, it has gained immensely in

the element of surprise--and, incidentally, in its greater
amenability to translation.
31
Due to the enduring emphasis on an appealing musica

lity in Arabic poetry, though, a good measure of the old
metrical discipline has been preserved in most new concepts
of poetic form.
The critic Muhammad al-Nuwayhi was one
of the first to oppose convincingly
al-Mala~ika's
elaborate
metrical regulations for free verse and urge the approxi

mation of poetry towards the spoken language--a most compli
cated undertaking when a profusion of twenty-two major,
and hundreds of minor, Arabic dialects are"in question.
Objecting strenuously to the fact that the old meter forces
language into cliche and artifice
and is incapable of
recreating the rhythms of contemporary speech, he, like

Jabra and al-Khal, is yet convinced that meter need not be
a burden on the poet. 19
In the modern Arabic literary maga
zines there is no paucity of free verse written without meter,

or even of prose poetry, qasidat al-nathr.
It
poem in prose,"
(The term, meaning
is derived from the same root as manthur,
the verb being nathara--literally, "scattered or spread out

at random.")
A number of the poets translated in the present
anthology exhibit a preference for writing aI-shier al

manthur, including Jabra, Macn Basisu, Ghada al-Samman,
Tawfiq Zayyad and Bandar aI-Hamid; and Adonis, as well as
Unsi aI-Hajj, are fervent admirers of the prose poem.
How
ever, metrical free verse appears to satisfy Arab poets best,

granting a sufficient looseness of composition together with
32
a clear musical unity between lines.

The tafCilah is the most important unit upon which
Arabic metrical free verse depends.
The modern poem need
not entirely dismiss rhyme, but may create its own irregu
lar inner rhymes; however, its essential music is imparted
by the new rhythmical structures adapted trom the variation
of the poetic foot.
As a new departure, the poet may use
a different taf'ilah in every line of the poem.
(The
taf'ilah of the first line may be fa'ilatun; the tafCilah

of the second may be facilun, so long as their rhythms
harmonize to the Arab ear.
It is even possible for
each stanza of a poem to have a different taf'ilah without

impairing the beauty and unity of the whole.
al-shi~r al-hurr is modelled upon a varied,
In sum,
intricate
scheme of the tafCilah liberated from the two-hemistich

structure of the line, in an irregular metrical pattern
which permits the line length to be determined by its
contents, often mixing two compatible meters, and permit
ting the use of run-on lines.
Thus the rhythmical mono
tony of classical meter is replaced by a more flexible

and hence more interesting use of cadence and repetition,
while Arabic free verse retains a pronounced formal quality_
From these elements the most skillful poets, Sayyab
or Adonis, for instance, create their own distinctive
33
music which successfully matches the content and structure.

The poem "Christ After Crucifixion" (p. 239), to be dis
cussed in the second section of this study, illustrates
Sayyab's skillful adaptation to free verse of a very diffi
cult taf<ilah from the al-khabab meter.
In the first and
second stanzas Sayyab breaks down the meter from its four
taf(ilah hemistich with the introduction of irregularly
rhymed lines ranging from three to five taf'ilah's.
seven-taf'ilah line opens the third stanza, where the

tafCilah itself comes close to dissolving into prosaic
rhythms, or changes briefly and almost indiscernably into
a new taf'ilah, fa'ulun or sometimes fa<ilun, in place of
facilun.
Thus the sudden shift from the dream-like perspec
tive of the first and second stanzas to the sharp narrative

concerning Judas in the third is accentuated on a prosodic
level.
The fourth stanza contains an especially interesting
onomatopoeic effect.
The sound of the soldiers' footsteps
over the grave which open the stanza are approximated by

the pattering rhythm of the taf<ilah, abetted by a sprin
kling of emphatic consonants, and momentarily restrained
by the reduction of the taf(ilah from three to two syllables
at the reference to the rocks weighing upon Christ's chest:
34
-----
Qadamun taCdu, qadamun qadamu
'--
fa'ilun
....-.;;:...
fa<lun
fa'ilun
../
fa'ilun
[A running step, steps.]
Al-qabru yakadu biwaqCi khutaha yanhadimu

fa~lun
facilun
fa'ilun facilun fa'lun
fa'ilun
[The grave is sure to collapse with these steps.]

'Atura.ja'uu?
fa'ilun fa'lun
Man ghayruhumu?
"""'-
fa<lun
[Have they come?
--"'"
facilun
Who but they?]
Qadamun; qadamun.
Qadamu
facilun
[A step--another.]
'Alqaytu s-sakhra cala sadri .
fa'lun
fa(lun
facilun fa'lun
[The rocks cascade on my chest . ]
The first sustained use in the poem of another form of the

taf'ilah, fa<ilun, signals a meditative turn at the lines:
~ ::lana ?~a 'a~nu f~abriya 'l~zlim.:s
ta'ilun
facilun
facilun faeilun
facilun
[Here I am naked now in my dark grave.]
35
Kuntu bil'amsi ~altaffu kalzanni, kalburCumi,

~
/'-.P--.-/'"'"--_'/
fa'ilun
fa '"ilun
fa'ilun
fa ~ilun
fa:cilun
'-=
[Yesterday I was furled like doubt, like a bud;]

Tahta
"""---
~akfaniya
fa'ilun
th-thalji yakhdallu zahru d-dami

./'---
facilun
..-"""---../"--
fa~ilun
fa(ilun
fa'ilun
[The flowers of blood drip under my snowy shrouds.]
-----
Kuntu kaz-zilli bayna d-duja wan-nahar

'------------~
..-/
facilun
facilun
fa:cilun
fa'ilun
[I was like the shadow between night and day]
Thumma fajjartu nafsi kunuzan faCarraytuha kath-thimar ...
[Until I exploded my very being into a shower of treasures,
stripped it like fruit ... ]
The balance of the poem combines the two taf'ilah's, facilun

and facilun, in such a way that the intensity or serenity of
tone is paced by the preponderance of long or short tafCilah's.
Sayyab and Adonis, along with others like Hijazi
and al-Maghut, have discovered that time and place are
also very important to both the form and idiom of the poem.
When Adonis writes about an historical character, as in
"The Days of the Hawk" (p.
~~~),
he is certain to suggest
the idiom and the music of the region, thus capturing the
36
spirit of the place and the emotions of the event, and

effectively recreating the dignity of classical poetic
speech in very modern terms.
In contrast, a poet dealing
with the sense of enclosure and alienation of modern city

life, as Ahmad c;Abd al-MuC. ti Hijazi does in "The Lonely
Woman's Room"
(p. 209) might choose to evoke a nervous,
brooding, unpredictable music:

Kul1u shay)in 1ahu mawdi'un 1a yubarihuhu
[Everything has a permanent place]
Wahudurun,
[and a presence]
Lahu min khuta'l-waqti khubzun wamaJun
[and a time to receive its bread and water]
Wamin zil1iha'l-muta)arjihi )ighfa)atun wadithar

[and in her swaying shadow it finds a blanket and rest]
Ku11u shay'in lahu ma'aha shahwatun wabukaJun,
[Everything about her has a desire and a cry--]
Lahu nakhatu'l-jasadi 'l-muta'awwidi wihdatahu ....
[Has the feel of a body familiar with loneliness ... ]
Hijazi accomplishes this by the use of long and short
lines, dispensing with the tafCilah under any disguise,
and resorting to rhyme in an intriguingly erratic fashion.
The last word of each stanza rhymes, and a very few iso
1ated rhymes appear to have been casually sprinkled over
the poem:
the (in Arabic) one-word lines 14 and 16,
mindadah (night table) and minfadah (ash tray), for

pIe.
exam~
Lacking any adaptation of the taf Ci 1ah, "The Lonely
37
Woman's Room" is obviously not metrical free verse, but

a poised and intelligent example of a still more lenient
form, aI-shier al-manthur.
By the late 'fifties, aI-shier al-manthur had gained
a secondary interest to aI-shier al-hurr among Arab
modernists.
As in English free verse, rhyme almost
completely disappears in al-shi~r al-manthur, or else is

exploited in an unconventional manner.
or combination of meters is retained.
No specific meter
The "musical phrase"
is the main source of the poem's euphony, and economy of

language is a supreme consideration.
Such a profusion of
adjectives as, for instance, are employed to enhance the

atmosphere and musicality of al-Mala)ika's highly metrical
free verse is eliminated.
AI-Khal, Tawfiq Sayigh and al
Maghut have adopted the form with brilliance, finding in

it the most direct and dramatic means of expressing a
powerful message uncushioned by the conventional graces
of poetry.
Instead, their poetry is invested with a more
startling music, and a stark grace of language all its own.

While, like "The Lonely Woman's Room," some poems
written in al-shicr_al-manthur do not exhibit any consistent
use of the tafCilah, gradations in rhythmic formality do
exist.
For instance, al-Khal's "The Eternal Dialogue"
(p. 252 ) can, with a little ingenuity, be viewed in terms

of the taf'ilah "mafaGilun," though downplayed and divorced
38
from its original metrical application.
After the markedly
rhythmic opening, however, the taf'ilah becomes very

difficult to distinguish.
By the seventeenth line it has
become sharply abbreviated, and is broken or nearly

dissolved for the remainder of the poem.
It should be observed that neither type of free
verse would seem conducive to consistently superior poetry,
more "modern" or more "Arabic" in nature than the other.
In skillful hands aI-shier al-hurr may readily achieve
the economy and flexibility of expression required in
Western concepts of a "modern" poem, while, on the other
hand, it is by no means certain that a poet choosing to
write aI-shier al-manthur will express ideas and attitudes
derivative of foreign cultures.
There can be no
ques~
tion, for instance, that al-Maghut's incisive wit was

sharpened upon the peculiar and violent contradictions
of modern Arab life, however much he may have admired
Rimbaud and Baudelaire, compounding his own supremely
easy_and natural style which tends towards direct state
-,_::"
ment with the symbolic and sensual dimensions of the

French poets.
The free verse movement has generated experimentation
on more than a prosodic level.
Every feature of the poem,
from its physical and structural nature to its cultural
39
and emotional implications, has been subjected to scrutiny.

Attributes of poetry which had previously been circumscribed
either by metrical or rhetorical conventions gradually
gained in importance:
the length and shape of the poem,
its command of tone and point of view, and the suitability of

dialect and the vernacular to the modern poetic idiom are
all issues which have been profoundly affected by the
introduction of new forms.
The long poem is a relatively new arrival in Arabic
verse.
Due to the limitations of the monorhyme scheme,
the length of the traditional poem seldom exceeded 150

lines.
With the greater liberty of the new forms, most of
the major poets have undertaken to test their evident suita

bility to a more extended poetic expression.
Al-Mala'ika,
Sayyab, Hawi, Adonis, Tawfiq Sayigh, al-Maghut and cAbd

al-Sabur are foremost among the pioneers in this field.
Similarly, the poetic play is enjoying a resurgence in the
hands of poets like <Abd al-Sabur, Hijazi and al-Qasim,
now that it is released from the exigencies of the old
meter.
There is, however, little pretention as yet that
length of utterance is closely related to greatness of

utterance in poetry.
Poets are as much intrigued with
the potential of shorter and more compact forms.
The
short, circular poem has made a comeback, for instance,

with a subtler resort to the powers of suggestion to
40
end the poem on the same note as it began, instead of

repeating the initial hemistich or line verbatum.
The
visual impact of the poem on the page has gained a new

spectrum of possibilities, as in the "spiral" or tapering
poem, and the concrete poem.
Of course, not all attempts to forge distinctive new
forms result in innovative poetry of the first order.
Some
of the new poetry is still irregularly divided into a

rhyme scheme, and some into a pattern of long and short
lines.
Consciously or unconsciously, many to be sure are
basically traditional poems superficially "modernized tt by

chopping the traditional line into several on the page,
in the hope of adding interest to the presentation through
the altered layout.
Amal Dunqul
has written a number of
such poems, yet his contribution to the present anthology,

"The Murder of the Moon"
(p. 230), is an inventive blend
of rhymed and unrhymed metrical free verse.

interchangeable taf 'ilah' s, mutafa cilun
Here the
I mutfS:- C ilun, are
consistent throughout, though line length is not, and

enjambement or suspension of the taf'ilah sometimes occurs.
In the first stanza-of seventeen lines, lines 2 and 5
rhyme, lines 3, 4, 13 and 16, lines 11 and 15, and 14 and
17.
41
n-naba)a 'l-allma
sh-shamsi
'watanaqalu
_ J'- 'ala barIdi ________-
~
mutafa<'i
mutafa C.iltm
[And by post of the sun they spread the painful news]

Fi kulli 'l-madinah
ltm
mutfaciltm
mut
[Allover the city:]

"Qutila 'l...qamar!"
""'-../
mutafa Ciltm
["The moon has been killed!"]

~hidijhu ~n ta~ra)suh~qa sh-shaja~
mutafa'iltm
mutfaciltm
mutfa'iltm
mutfaCiltm
[They saw him crucified, his head dangling from the trees!]
Nahaba 'l-lususu quladata
'l~masi
th",,:thaminah ,
mutfa C iltm
mut
[Thieves stripped the costly diamond breastpin]

~ sadrih~
mutfa'iltm
[From his chest,]
~akuhu fi ~ad~
mutafaciltm
[And
mutfa <1
left him in the branches]
42
~turatj ~awda'i f~ynay dar~
lun
rnutfacilunrnutfa(ilun
rnutfa'ilun
[Like a black legend in the eyes of a blind man.]
The frequent snatches of dialogue contain their own

irregular internal rhymes.
Thus a
di~ferent
quality of
speech is confirmed between the country folk and a somewhat

more urbane narrator.
If there is (according to al-CAqqad's
dictum) no such thing as modernity of subject, it will be

noted that this poem, like Shadhil Taqah's "One-Eyed Liar"
(p. 150), possesses an informing modernity of attitude or
tone in the treatment of subject.
It often is identifi
able as irony--particularly when approaching the realm of

the modern fable, as these poems both do, with a backward
glance at the superstitions of the past.
The dramatic and comic, as well as ironic, effects of
the poem are likewise receiving greater attention.
modern dramatic poem still bears
The
a resemblance to that
written by Abu Tammam, but with two important additions:

the use of dialogue and monologue.
With few exceptions,
traditional Arabic verse was narrated either in the first

or third person, where little distinction was held between
the omnipresent voice of the poet and a fictive persona.
The highly personal, confessional nature of Arabic poetry
is still one of its marked traits, but an increasing inte
43
rest in other pOints-of-view--sometimes with humourous

modifications--is to be observed.
"It's a Lie"
Michel Trad's poem,
(p. 147), exemplifies this light-hearted
reconnaissance of new frontiers:

Lies! What lies!
They're saying
the moon brought me a doll,
threw it like a bouquet througn the window
That with one hand he set
two daffodils in my hair,
exploring my chest with the other
and said it was hot,
let's unfasten two buttons
That he sprayed my shirt with wine
and behind the trees
on the crossroad
unbuttoned my shirt
seemed annoyed, and flushed
And I still didn't know what was going on
--what was happening to my chest?
Among all the tulips,
among the blue dewdrops,
the moon himself has hidden
a pair of small birds
This poem is of particular interest as it is written
in the spoken Lebanese dialect, a gamble on the part of a
serious poet, as dialect poetry rarely meets with success
in the Arab world.
As the Egyptian dialect is a major
one, a number of contemporary Egyptian poets have succeeded

in popularizing their poetic language in this way--notably
Ahmad Rami,
'Abd al-Wahhab Muhammad, and Kamil al-Shinnawi,
who have written extensively for singers famed throughout

the Middle East
system.
and broadcast over the best developed media
Several Lebanese poets have also ventured into
44
dialect poetry, and again the medium of music has smoothed

the difficulties of transition.
Trad has written exclu
sively in dialect, and, like the Rahbani brothers' and

some of Sa<id cAql's poetry, these poems are written as
lyrics in the tradition of the zajal: simple lyrics of
eight feet to the quatrain, easily rhymed, and meant to
convey popular stories, dialogues or impromptu verbal
matches through song.
Poet-lyricists like Trad have
raised the zajal to a more complex art-form by varying

the meter and rhyme schemes, sharpening the imagery,
tightening and enriching the language, and decreasing the
monotonous repetitions.
These poets aim to elevate the
popular language to a position of respectability in the

literary world, and to reduce the distance imposed bet
ween art and life by linguistic barriers--much as the
contemporary Quebec poet, Gaston Miron, aims to do by incor
porating the idiomatic French of Quebec into his poetry.
Lebanese dialect poetry is intelligible to surrounding
Arab countries like Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait, as
well as to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya; but a North African
might encounter some difficulty in comprehending Trad's
poem.
The opening lines, transliterated from the dialect
on the left, and as they might read in literary Arabic on

the right hand side, are as follows:
45
Kizbi wshu kizbi:

Qalu minil taqa
Jabli lqamar li'bi
Wzatta mitil baqa
Kizbah ayyu kizbah:

Qalti min at-taqah r
~Atani alqamar bilu~bah
Waramaha mithla baqah
Wib "iid shakkalli

Shacri bnirjistayn
Wbaqbash bisadri bi~iid
Wabiyadin shakkala Ii
ShaCriya binarjisatayn
Wafattasha sadri biyadin
Obviously, the more obscure the dialect, the more limited

the audience an Arab poet may expect to reach.
With the aim of creating a life-like poetic language
free from the rhetorical excesses of the elevated style,
the modern poets who experiment in dialect express the
growing emphasis upon emotional realism in Arabic poetry.
It is no longer sufficient to strike the conventional poetic
poses, exuding the noble feelings which have always flowed

from the poet's pen in the order and magnitude expected of
the occasion.
The development and substantiation of emotion
are now accorded greater attention.
The new poet desires
each poem to convey the authenticity of an experience lived,

not necessarily in actual fact, but through the empathy of
the imagination:
otherwise, how could poetry aspire to be
placed, as Qabbani would have it, !lin every house, next to

the bread and the water"?21
The psychological unity and credibility of tne poem
are thus new grounds for examination by the modern poets.
While the speaker in a poem by Adonis may plunge through
a succession of differing emotions and psychological
46
states, these are not sentimentally exaggerated or utterly

disconnected, as was often the case in traditional poetry.
Parts of the poem may maintain a certain independence
from the rest, and the laws of logic and causality may be
frequently and deliberately defied.
At first glance the
poem may seem fragmentary, but it is by no means devoid of

its own special circuits of continuity--a less easily
apprehended logic that leaves clues between lines and is
concealed in images.
This unifying agent may be nothing
more than lIan emotional thread," as
Jayyusi describes the
quality which prevents the highly original, even strange

and IIrarified" imagery in a poem like Adonis's "A Vision"
(p.
284) from disintegrating. 22

In order to view at closer range some of these opera
ting forces in contemporary Arabic poetry, it will be of

interest to focus on the contrasts between the poetry of
two leading modernists of the present day, Adonis and
Muhammad al-Maghut.
The juxtaposition proves rewarding
from several points of view.
The work of these two Syrian
born poets, both self-exiled in Lebanon since the mid-fifties,

represents the best of two divergent strains of modern
Arabic poetry, subject to different influences, possessing
different artistic aims, and expressing itself in different
poetic forms and convictions about modern poetic language.
47
'
(b) Two Voices in Arab ic Mo d ernl.sm:
~All.' Ahmad Sa(l.'d

("Adonis") and Muhammad al-Maghut
Due to the gravity of his situation, the Arab poet

maintains a sober view of his artistic mission, which is
very little disturbed by self-directed irony, or any inti
mation that humour and absurdity are implicit in the busi
ness of making poems--other than as tools with which to
reveal and transform the world around him.
As will be
observed in the poems, "When the Words Burn" and
"Ice
and Fire" (pp. 179 and 184), al-Maghut is one of the few
who do not hesitate to compromise the fine figure of the
poet in a particularly refreshing way, and this he manages
to do without in the least compromising his sense of
involvement with humanity.
In dramatic contrast with al
Maghut's wry projection of the poet is that of Adonis,

who habitually adopts the didactic stance of a poetprophet and educator of the people.
His pronouncements
are delivered in a voice of oracular authority, and his

rebellious and visionary persona is surrounded and distanced
by mythological overtones:
And I saw--the clouds were a throat;
The waters, walls of flame;
I saw a sticky yellow thread-
A thread of history, that clung to me
From a hand that has inherited a sex of dolls,
An ancestry of rags.
It chews, knots, and loosens my days.
I entered the world in the womb of waters and
virginity of trees
48
I saw trees to tempt me,
I saw rooms between their branches,
Beds and windows, set to resist me ..
("A Vision"; p. 284)

A deep seriousness pervades the work of both poets,
however discrepant the tone.
In al-Maghut, flippant
cynicisms may turn out to be shock tactics to reveal the

painful realities of the Arab world, which he refuses to
ennoble or idealize.
Desperation lurks behind the sardonic
tone, and the poetic purpose is ignited by concerns of

the immediate, physical, known and loved world, not an
envisaged better one of the future, or for that matter
of the past.
AI-Maghut writes in "When the Words Burn":
The goddess of poetry
Stabs my heart like a knife
When I think I am singing poems to an unknown girl,
To a voiceless motherland
That eats and sleeps with everyone.
I can laugh till the blood runs from my lips ....
(p. 179)
If al-Maghut could be said to subscribe to anyone poetic

theory, it would undoubtedly have much in common with
the American imagist poet William Carlos Williams' defini
tion of the poetic task.
As Williams writes In his auto
biography, he attempted, in his long poem Paterson,

to find an image large enough to embody the
whole knowable world about me . to write
about the people close about me: to know in
detail, minutely what I was talking about--to
the whites of their eyes, to their very smells.
That is the poet's business. Not to talk in
vague categories but to write particularly, as
a physician works, upon a patient, upon the
49
thing before ht~, in the particular to discover

the universal.
The aim of the poet stated in the above lines of poetry
by al-Maghut contrasts to great effect with the near-mysti
cal view of poetic mission evidenced in a poem like Adonis's
liThe Crow's Featherll (p. 287).
In the latter poem the poet's
supreme impulse towards renewal enables him to detach

himself, determined to travel onwards to another city-
"with the fruits, with love," and "with the day"--should
Beirut wither to a state of barrenness impervious to spring.
Despite the most dismal conditions, Adonis affirms in the
closing lines of the poem man's creative resources to provide
himself with light, though denied light, and love, though with
out companions; he may also reap the fruits of his labours,
though his fields are smothered in grasshoppers and sand.
In order to implement his artistic vision the poet must
be prepared to live, if necessary, in constant exile,
never hesitating to erase things and then shape them anew:
"In the cancer of silence, in isolation / I write my poems
on the soil/With a crow's feather."
In this seeming
exercise in futility the poet's mission is fulfilled.

His is not the ethereal "glory of the dawn," but the
"wisdom of the dust"--knowledge of what man is made of, and
what his works will come to--and courage to continue writing
in the dust even though it is soon to be blown away.
Foremost among contemporary theorists of Arabic
50
metrical free verse, Adonis writes predominantly in that

form, while al-Maghut invariably writes in the form of
aI-shier al-manthur.
In treating historical and mythical
subject matter Adonis exercises a discriminating, learned

vocabulary in an "elevated" poetic language which he
himself has adapted into a finely tuned, vigorous modern
idiom.
In his surrealistic work, contortions of logic
and syntax reflect the need to remake and rename the

world, challenging conventions of thought through conven
tions of language.
AI-Maghut launches a blunter attack
on the conventions of thought and language.
Almost conver
sational, his poetry is closer than Adonis's to the actual

rhythms of speech, more consistently written in modern
literary Arabic, the language of newspapers, the educated,
and of international congress between Arabs of differing
dialects.
In Arabic poetry it is unexpectedly casual
language, not above slipping mischievously from the verna

cular to the classical, yet always appropriate to the sen
timent evoked.
In company with Hija-zi, Qabbani and most
of the palestinian poets, al-Maghut belongs to a minority

of Arab'poets who favour an accessible literary language,
rather than one which abounds with terms unfamiliar to
the modern speaker.
A close study of "When the Words Burn" yields an
insight into al-Maghut's craftsmanship, for the complexity
of emotions with which the poet approaches his subject is
51
mirrored on the level of language.
A fine mistrust of
the heroic in himself, as well as in the tired relics of

glory cherished by his society, distinguishes al-Maghut's
brand of satire, but this satire is curiously commingled
with a painful sense of the tragic.
Any sequence of
lines from the poem is a multiple attack on a strange

admixture of feelings in the reader, shocking, amusing,
and arousing him by unexpected turns.
Nothing quite in
the vein of these opening lines had been heard before the
appearance of the poem in 1958:
Poetry, this immortal carcass, bores me.
Lebanon is burning-
It leaps, like a wounded horse, at the edge
.
of the desert
And I am looking for a fat girl
To rub myself against on the tram,
For a Bedouin-looking man to knock down somewhere ..
Supporting the curious juxtaposition of the tragic and
the trivial is a deliberate disparity of diction.
Classi
cal, though not obsolete poetic words occasionally lend

emphasis to a tragic or sober image:
the word yathibu
("leaps") in line 3, and '>untha al-shibl
("lioness"
or literally, "female lion") in the eighth line; whereas

satiric purposes are well served in intermittent lines by
the use of words which are simple, familiar, and mundane:
~ahtakku
("rub myself"), fatat saminah ("fat girl"), and
hafilah ("tram"), for example.
But the
clich~s
of historical
52
grandeur, especially those related to the heroic and the

romantic desert tradition, are subtly derided by a choice
of border-line archaisms:
the eagle that swoops on
(yadribu--literally, "strikes") his prey;al-kuthban,

"heaps of sand," seen. as al-nuhudu al-shamta:> I "hoary
breasts"; and mihmaz, "spear."
In effect, al-Maghut has
turned this language celebrating the romance of the past

against itself, exposing its stale valours and ineffectual
ideals, the withered laurels upon which Arab nationalism
rests while the modern Arab world is reeling under the
shock of more recent events--the Palestinian disaster of
1948, the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, or the senseless
civil war raging in Lebanon the year the poem was published.
A comparable technique in English poetry might be observed
in the cantos of Ezra Pound, particularly in Cantos No. VIII,
XXX, XXXVI, and XLV, where Pound's deliberately laboured
archaisms emphasize the far-away aesthetic of medieval
poetry.
Thus, in Canto XLV:

Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her patternj
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is
unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man's courting
It hath brought palsey to bed .
Adonis is another poet who would sweep away irrele
53
vant beliefs and traditions, but one whose rebellion is

based on the insight that overthrowing the past is the
first step towards fulfilling and extending it.
From the
heroic historical tradition Adonis believes that modern

man may find inspiration to seek out new grounds for an
assertion of greatness, the construction of a sublime
"New Andalusia" in Arab'culture, for instance, as in "The
Days of the Hawk"
(p. 292).
In "Elegy on the Days at
Hand,1I he proclaims that it is possible to "wash" history-

if need be, by means of "marrying the storm"-- learn from
the corruptions of the past, and "fill the earth with the
screams of new things. 1I24
As his pen-name suggests, Adonis is prominent in the
ranks of the "Tammuzi" poets who, beginning with Sayyab,
drew from the regenerative myth of Tammuz, or Adonis, a
symbolic language for the insidious forces of decay
expectations of rebirth in their society.
and
The sacrificial
death, descent to the underworld, and restorative imagery

of seasons
an~
vegetation provide a submerged framework
for "The Crow's Feather," thus lending mythological support

to its claim that one must surrender to the destructive
element in order to emerge revitalized.
A recurrent theme
in Adonis is that the path to abundant and creative life,

the path to order itself, leads through chaos.
The burning
and dying of words in al-Maghut's poem, "When the Words
54
Burn," are tragic images, but in "The Crow's Feather"

such burning is an immolation, a purifying rite.
In the
third stanza, the speaker arouses himself from the state

of suffocation and despair
induced by life in Beirut, and
characterized by lounging in cafes while political upheaval

brews.
He cries out his desire to kneel and pray, albeit
to strange gods:
to a broken-winged owl (like the crow,
a bird of ill omen), "To the embers, to the winds,"

To death and to disease-
And in my incense burn
My white days and my songs,
My notebook and the ink, and inkwell.
I want to pray
To all gods ignorant of prayer.
Destruction, whether by water or by fire, is often

seen as a catalyst in the birth of a new order in modern
Arabic poetry.
"Burn me, burn me so I may shine!" Samih
al-Qasim demands of his grief upon the defeat of his

native palestine ("Come, Together We Shall Draw a Rainbow"i
p. 349).
The "thunderbird" is Qasim's grim harbinger of
change in a number of other poems, as the hawk, or the

phoenix rising from its ashes, is in Adonis.
I~Marrying
the storm" is another of Adonis's metaphors for sweeping

away what is withered and decayed in tradition, and engen
de ring lush new life.
Mahmud Darwish avails himself of
a similar symbolism in "Promises With the Storm" (p. 344),

attributing the same ambivalent character of destroyerpreserver to the storm, which
55
has swept
The voices of lazy birds
And borrowed branches
From the trunks of the straight trees.
I will, then,
Take pride in this wound of the city,
The canvas of lightning in our sad nights.
Though the street frowns in my face
It protects me from shadows and malign glances
So I sing for joy
Behind fearful eyelids.
When the storm struck in my country
It promised me wine, and rainbows.
In an earlier poem, the title poem for a volume by 'Abd
al-Wahhab al-Bayati (p. 135), "broken urns" are the decayed
remains of an Arab"world which forever busies itself in
persecuting its outspoken poets and thinkers.
Purifica
tion both by fire and water are central features of the

poem's imagery.
The oppressed are exhorted to "Build
your future cities / on the brink of Vesuvius"; to "Let

violent love ignite / flames in your breast, and profound
joy."
Then it is that God's fearsome blaze and destruc
tive flood anticipate rebirth:

God and the blazing light, and the slaves test
their chains:
A new stream! a spring bursts out in our lifeless
living
let the dead bury their dead
and torrents sweep over
these ugly urns, and the drums sound
and the doors shall be open to the rising sun
and the spring
56
As one might expect with Adonis, who pulls the world

inside himself rather than standing back to examine it,
this drastic cleansing process which precedes renewal is
as likely to be identified with the self, and specifically
the writer's self, as it is likely to manifest itself in
the external world.
Thus the act of writing is itself
destructive as well as creative.
"According to Adonis,"
Adnan Haydar relates, "al-kitaba, or 'ecriture,' as Roland

Barthes calls it, is not language as we know it, but
a displacement, a breaking away from the accepted and the
known
It is subversive, fawdawiyya, because it seeks
to destroy logical temporality and causality.,,25
Quoting
Adonis's remarks in a Lebanese newspaper in 1978, Haydar

stresses that al-kitaba may also lead to chaos, a prospect
which does not disturb Adonis.
Adonis says,
"'If it does, then let it,'
'but it is chaos only with reference to the
old predetermined method ..
It may lead to confusion,
but it will also lead to freedom and creativity ,,,26

0
There is no suggestion of renewal to follow upon

sacrifice in "When the Words Burn."
The title itself
contains a yet more ominous image of the poetic act than

"The Crow's Feather" does; for evidently in al-Maghut's
estimation the destruction of a nation outweighs the signi
ficance of a single man's artistic endeavour.
The speaker
of the poem is prepared to succumb to the surrounding devas
57
tation--not in hopes of purification, but because it

renders hollow the poet's words, robbing him of his last
illusions of serious accomplishment.
These are insuppor
table terms for existence to an artist, left to jeer at

his own diminished powers:
.. follow me, the empty ship,
The wind laden with bells.
Over the faces of mothers and refugees,
Over the decaying verses and meters
I will spurt fountains of honey
I will write about trees or shoes, roses or boys.
The lot of the dispossessed is artistic suicide.
Poetry
is, at once, virtually useless in the midst of widespread

human suffering and political disaster, as insubstantial
as "the wind laden with bells"--and yet sufficient reason
to rekindle the will to live.
The anguish 6f the poem
is centred squarely on this paradox:
the "immortal carcass"
of poetry.
In al-Maghut's work, an informality of structure; the
intimate and loquacious style preferred by the speaker,
and lightning changes in subject, tone and emotional impact
are well served by the flexible form of al-shi'r
al~manthur
But Adonis's restless involvement with history is conso

nant with his talent for metrical innovation.
Kamal Abu-
Deeb pays tribute to Adonis's resourcefulness in shaping

his vision to the formal and structural attributes of
poetry:
58
In his perpetual motion, Adonis embraces the world

with what is, on many levels, a Sufi (mystic)
vision, becoming transparent, mysterious, dwelling
in the objects of the universe, between the thing
and itself, and in all this, creating a poetic
world of incredible purity and harmony. The
very structure of his poem embodies his vision:
he unifies the external, phonetic and rhythmic
properties of the poem with its internal prop er
ties in a manner unique in modern Arabic poetry. 27
"The Crow's Feather" is a poem which invites compari
son with al-Maghut's "When the Words Burnt!
as it reflects
the spiritual aridity of Beirut on the verge of civil

war in 1957, and poses the problem of artistic detachment
from the infected life of city and nation.
But it is as
unlike al-Maghut's poem in form and structure as in

attitude towards this problem.
While it is not an example of Adonis's most daring
prosodic experiments, "The Crow's Feather" may serve to
reinforce the brief illustrations offered previously in
this study of the kind of license a writer of Arabic metri
cal free verse might take with a traditional hemistich or
combination of taf<ilah's.
Each line in the poem is based
on a single hemistich of the aI-sari' meter, "mustaf cilun

mustaf('ilun facilun," where the tafCilah, mustaf!ilun can
be abridged to mutaf<:ilm'!.1 for instance, and facilun may
be altered to facilun, faclun, or fatcrlun.
Adonis reduces
the line to a single hemistich, and breaks the meter by
59
introducing an irregular combination of long and short lines

of three and two tafCilah's respectively.
Again he departs
from the meter by varying or replacing fa'ilun for long

stretches with faCTIl, mustaf or mutaf.
In the third and
fourth stanzas this abbreviated taf'ilah is sometimes length

ened to better complete an idea, or is even replaced by
mustaf'ilun.
Thus, Stanza II is transliterated:
Pi saratani s-samti fi 'l-hisar
'-....-/'
mustaf'ilun
musta"ihm
mutaf
[In the cancer of silence, in isolation]

'Aktubu )ash'ari (ala t-turab
mustaf<ilun
musta<ilun
mutaf
[X write my poems on the soil]
Birishati
mutafCilun
mutaf
(With a crow's feather.]

~A<rifu
"-..:.:
la
daw~a 'ala jufuni-
~
~
/
musta'ilun
musta Cilun
fa cillun
[I know no light on my eyelids--]

'i~la
Lashay)a,
hikmata
'----------
mustaf'ilun
mustaf'ilun
'~huba:/
mutaf
[I know nothing but the wisdom of the dust.]
60
~jlisu fi '~aqha maca ~
musta (,ilun
mustaft.ilun
mutaf
[All day in the cafe I sit]
~aC.
khashabi "J:]~
mustac ( ilun
mustaf
[With the wood of the chair]

waCaqabi'l-lufafati'l-marmiy
mustaf
[And a dead cigarette butt,]
~jlisu fi ~iza5
musta'ilun
mutaf
[I sit awaiting]
------mustaf
Maw'idiya 'l-mansiy
"-
musta c:'ilun
[A forgotten rendez-vous.]
A rhyme scheme is employed, but a very erratic one.

The eighteen lines of the first stanza are represented
schematically below, as to rhyme scheme and line length.
As if to deliberately snap the spell when the speaker's
poetic vision threatens to cloud itself in romantic termi
nology, an incongruous rhyme is sometimes used to pair an
abstract with a concrete, homely and mundane object.
The
rhyming of salah (prayer) with dawah (inkwell) in Stanza
61
liThe Crowls Feather": Stanza I

Line
Line Length
Line
Rhyme
Line Length
Rhyme
long
11
long
12
short
short
13
short
short
14
long
short
15
long
long
16
short
long
17
long
short
18
long
long
10
short
long
III has this effect, as does the striking triple rhyme

in Stanza II of kursiy (chair), marmiy (thrown away;
translated here as "dead" cigarette butt), and mansiy
(forgotten)--a conspicuously romantic word in Arabic,
much as the succeeding word, "rendez-vous,1I is in English.
While rhymes have not been preserved in the present
translations, and the Arabic poetic foot obviously cannot
be reproduced in English, I believe that something of
the essential difference between Arabic free verse with
and without meter can be ascertained by the English
speaking reader if the rhythmical qualities of my trans la
tion of Adonisls poem are compared with those of alMaghut's.
There is a pronouced
orderliness to the music
1\
of liThe Crowls Feather" even in English, controlled and
62
hypnotic rhythms which have little in common with the

sprawling, conversational rhythms I have attempted to
recreate in my translation of "When the Words Burn."
III. The TammuziPoets:Regeneration in the Wasteland

(a) A Growing Interest in Foreign Mythologies
Among the features of the Arabic poem since the middle
of this century is an increasing use of myth, symbol and
legend, reshaped to incorporate themes of contemporary sig
nificance.
The Koran was a rich traditional source of
poetic symbolism, but the modern Arab poet began to borrow

heavily from other sources:
folk tales, historical figures,
Arabic and Greek legends, Islamic, Christian and Jewish philo

sophers, tales and legends from other cultures.
Unpreceden
ted attention has been accorded to the adventures and

hardships of famous wanderers and martyrs--figures like Job,
Sinbad, Ulysses, and al-Hallaj (the Persian Sufi put to
death by the (Abbasid inquisition in 922 A.D. for declaring
his oneness with God).
Often the poet seeks to draw explicit
parallels between his own experience and that of the heroic

figure portrayed.
Thus Salah 'Abd al-Sabur's
explorations
into a modern poetic language are commemorated by Salem

Haqqi in an elegy entitled nSinbad's Last Journey":
Restless, his imagination summoned him
Back to the ship,
He longed
For faraway places
Rich with hidden meadows and secrets
Pregnant with legends, wisdom, and bounty.
(p. 323)
In one poem, Adonis conceives his mission as that of liThe
New Noah," saviour and seed of
a new creation, but not one
64
dictated by the God of tradition:

I will come in my ark with a poet
and a free rebel;
We shall travel together
Heedless of God's words.
We will open our hearts to the flood,
Dive in the mud and strip pebbles
And clay from the eyes of the floating;
We will whisper in their veins that we
Have made the ascent,
Emerged from the cave,
And changed the course of time.
(p. 278)
Some poets identify with folk, literary and religious
figures in Arabic history like the warrior-poet CAntarah
(~
525-615 A.D.; Philip K. Hitti dubs him "the Achilles of
the Arabian heroic age,,28) and al-Mutanabbi (915-965 A.D.);

the poet-philosopher and Moslem heretic, al-Ma'arri (d. 1057
A.D.); or the fourth Caliph, 'Ali, and his son al-Husayn,
who were assasinated and "martyred" respectively in the first
century of Islam.
the making.
Mythical figures are, however, still in
The modern Arab's imagination has been capti
vated by such tragic or heroic world figures of the present

century as Lorca, Guevara, Allende, Lenin, Nasser, and the
(female) Algerian rebel, Jamila Bu-Hayrid.
Several Moslem
poets went so far as to take the person of Jesus Christ as

a predominant sourceof symbolism.
Notably, Sayyab and
'Abd al-Sabur joined their Christian confreres, Hawi and

al-Khal, in writing poetry about Jesus' crucifixion and
resurrection, often introducing allusions to the Adonis or
65
Osiris myths.
Both Sayyab and 'Abd al-Sabur were criti
cized for this by Moslem religious leaders and critics, but

they strongly felt that the poet should be receptive not
only to the influences of classical Arabic culture and his
tory, but to world-wide experience in the scope of their
literary symbolism.
Sayyab had early begun to write free verse which fea
tured an artistic, interpretative use of myths borrowed from
Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Phoenician sources.
Initially
under the influence of his immediate predecessors in Arabic

literature, by the early 'fifties he had fallen under the
spell of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and profited by his
fellow poet Jabra's translation of those portions of Sir
James Frazer's The Golden Bough which shed light on the
origins of the Adonis myth.
As the Iraqi critic ~Abd al
Rida CAli acknowledges in his study of myth in the poetry of

al-Sayyab, other
Arab
poets of the twentieth century pre
ceded Sayyab in reviving interest in primitive and pagan

.
29
s t or1es.
Al-Mazini and al-'Aqqad of the Diwan School and
Abu Shadi of the Apollo group of poets had read the classical
Greek and Roman myths and retold them in their poetry.
Admittedly, their employment of myth was not of a highly
imaginative order:
these poems read rather like liberal
translations of myths into Arabic, with optional acknow

ledgements of the original sources.
However, it is to their
66
credit that the doors were opened to foreign, secular and

"pagan" traditions in Arabic poetry, and they did not shy
away from confrontation with the critics on this issue.
"Some of the
[Arab]
critics are so mistaken as to repu
diate the grafting of our Arabic literature with the Greek

mythology in which we are sadly impoverished," Abu Shadi
responded to an attack on his use of "foreign" subject
matter in 1934.
"Whereas the English, after having their
fill of all the old treasures of Europe, take delight in

the translation of Khayyam, al-Macarri, al-Baha)
Zuhayr,
ibn al-Farid, and other Eastern poets into their language.,,30

In the early 'forties the Lebanese poet Ilyas Abu
Shabakah was similarly influential in the modernization
of Biblical images and prototypes, though his renditions
of archetypal stories about deceptive women--Samson and
Delilah, Lot and his daughters--are often merely twice
told tales with an axe to grind.
It was 'Ali Mahmud Taha
who invested the mythological poem with the dramatic element

of dialogue.
Taha also inspired Sayyab in his prior
attempt to delve into the symbolic dimension of myth,

exploiting its suggestive power to reflect an individual
experience rather than repeating an old story in its
entirety.
In his poem cited earlier in this study,
"Layali Kiliubatra," Taha dramatizes a langorous night on

the Nile by interchanging the narrative voice with the
67
inner voice of the Egyptian queen:

She was sent forth in a boat inspired by all arts,
The joyful oar swaying with lyric beauty
My darling, this is the night of my love;
Would that you shared my heart's joy!
Ours is a night of wine and longing, which sing

all around us
And there is a boat swimming in the light
to guard our shadows.
The night harboured others drunk with beauty,
who awoke before us.
Would that they knew love, and were like us!
Oh my love, everything in the night is a singing
spirit!
Give me my glass, it is the night of my love;
Would that you shared my heart's joy!
A uniform strength of lines, tasteful distribution of

decorative poetic devices, and politely veiled, yet evoca
tive sexual imagery combine to make this one of Taha's best
known romantic verses.
Having studied Taha's technique of
dramatic presentation, Sayyab introduced his own highly

original blend of mythological symbolism to free verse.
The
opening stanza of his poem, "Christ After Crucifixion" (p.

239), which assimilates the redemptive imagery surrounding
the god-man figures of Christ and Tammuz, bespeaks Sayyab's
indebtedness to the older poet while demonstrating his
improvement upon the earlier dramatic technique:
After they took me down I heard the winds
In a long wail skim the palm trees
And the steps fade.
68
The wounds
And the cross they nailed me to for the whole
afternoon
Did not kill me, though. And I listened: the wailing
Travelled across the field to me from the city
Like the rope that pulls on the ship
While it sinks to the depths. The lamentation was
Like a string of light between the morning
And the darkness in the bleak winter sky.
And then the city drowsed upon its affairs.
An emphasis on strong verbs rather than pleasing adjectives,
effective variation of line length, and precision as well
as profundity of thought add weight to Sayyab's passionately
musical outpourings, unrivalled in their beauty and
prosodic originality in modern Arabic poetry.
"It is certain that Western writers are those who
inspired our poets to return to the world of myth, whether
or not they wished to be so influenced," <Abd al-Rida 'Ali
31
has contested.
That this was, indeed, an influence attri
butable to initiators of the modern movement in Arabic
poetry with international literary tastes is confirmed by
Sayyab's own testimony.
"I fell under the influence of the
Egyptian engineer (Ali Mahmud Taha for some time," Sayyab

recalls,
and through this poet's translations of English
and French poets like Shelley, Baudelaire and
Verlaine I discovered new horizons in poetry.
My desire to learn more about them drove me to
learn the En~lish language and to read world
literature. 3
69
Afflicted by illness and poverty, Sayyab did not, like

most of the other central poets of the "Tammuzi" group,
hold a post-graduate degree from a foreign university.
Hawi had earned a doctorate, and Jabra a master's degree,
in England; Adonis had studied for a period at the Sorbonne
before earning a doctorate in Lebanon; a1-Kha1 had studied
English at the American University of Beirut, lived in New
York, where he edited an Arabic newspaper, and worked for the
United Nations both in America and in Libya before returning
to Beirut.
Sayyab was educated in the Teacher's Training
College of Baghdad and, self-exiled from the suppressive poli

tical regimes in Iraq from the mid-fifties, wandered exten
sively over the Arab world, visiting Europe periodically for
medical purposes.
Yet oddly enough it was through the poetry
of Sayyab, foremost among the Tammuzi poets, that what M.M.

Badawi terms "the strangely powerful influence of T.S. E1iot,,33
impressed itself decisively upon the Arabic literary world.
Apart from a few isolated Eliot enthusiasts, Arab
poets and critics were, as we have said, largely unaffected
until the late 1940's by the movements in contemporary
Western poetry in which Eliot and Pound were central figures.
The Sudanese Mu(awiya Nur (1909-1941) and Egyptian Copt,
Luwis 'Awad, are virtually the only exceptions in this
regard.
(Awad's recommendation that Arabs read Eliot and
abandon the traditional meter and pointless complexity of
70
language is marred, however, by his injunction to read less

of their own literary ancestors like Abu Tarnrnam.
Following
a controversial article to this effect in the magazine

al-Katib al-Misri [Egyptian Writer] in 1946, cAwad published
a volume of verse entitled Blutoland wa-Qasa'id )Ukhra
[Plutoland and Other Poems] in 1947, featuring poems in the
spoken as well as classical Arabic which are stylistically
and linguistically reminiscent of Eliot.
in St. Lazare"
In "Love
(p. 144) of the same volume, Eliot's tech
niques of incongruous contrast, anticlimax, impartial mix

ture of the modern with the old, contemporary with classical
allusions, and the borrowed or echoing phrase are all to
be observed in this early example of al-shi~r al-manthur.
(It will be noted that "Prufrock," The Odyssey, and.Baude
laire's manner of addressing the reader are none too subtly
recalled in the following excerpt from the poem.)
In Victoria Station I sat, a spindle in my hand-
Odysseus' spindle.
Forgive me, reader, if we disagree,
for I have seen them, I have seen the Argos.
They were mostly women wearing
pantaloons and rubber shoes.
But we--you and I, and the lonely Prufrock
have the spindles to amuse us ..
,Awad's
attempt to transpose certain features of modern
English poetry into Arabic was courageous and well-informed,

but not invested with the sort of burning originality that
71
makes for memorable poetry.
The final effect is often
that of a patchwork of allusions.

The serious impact of Eliot's poetry reached Arabic
literary circles in the early 1950's when, throughout the
Middle East, Arabs began to study Eliot's poetry and debate
his critical views.
A large part of his appeal is due to
the fact that Eliot defines the position of the modern,

"progressive" classicist.
Without devaluating the classical
poetic tradition, Eliot offered what Arab poets had been

seeking:
stylistic, prosodic and thematic freedom from the
traditional Arabic poem, and a form of realism which is not

hostile to the life of the spirit, but permits the poet to
treat his subject unhampered by the rhetorical conventions.
By the middle of the decade, the list of Eliot's translators
was distinguished by at least a dozen prominent names in
Arabic poetry.
Jabra attributes the recent revolution in
Arabic poetic form partially to the influence of Eliot's

early poetry. 34
Badawi further asserts that
The influence of Eliot is shown not only in the

structure and style, the use of myth and allusion
and of the interior monologue, in Iraqi, Lebanese
and Egyptian poetry, but Eliot's attacks on the
English Romantic poets, his reaction against what
he regarded as their limitations both in style
and subject matter, no doubt affected the atti
tude of the younger generation of Arab poets
towards their own romantic poetry, making them
reject the false simplicity, the sentimentality
and sugary poeticality of some romantic poetry
in favour of a pregnant style more capable of
expressing real-life experience in all its com
plexity and harshness. 35
72
(b) Tammuz/Adonis Rediscovered:
The Influence of
T.S. Eliot on the Tammuzi Poets

Traces of Eliot's influence are scattered throughout
Sayyab's poetry in phrases, lines, images and ideas:
that
Sayyab learned much from Eliot's style and techniques, his

distinctive use of legend, symbol, metaphor, and double
meanings, has been well documented by Arab critics. 36
But
the most important concern is not whether echoes of Eliot

recur frequently in certain of Sayyab's turns of phrase,
or sources of allusion.
Echoes of Edith Sitwell, Pablo
Neruda, Lorca, Aragon and Eluard are also demonstrable, for

that matter.
On a technical level, Sayyab's choice of words,
his linguistic sensitivity, his experimentation with form

and with dialect, his ability to make the taf(ilah and the
musical phrase yield to the desired emotional impact,
and his creative use of internal rhyme are as innovative in
the Arabic language as Eliot was in English.
More impor
tantly, all the social, religiOUS, political and historical

issues that interested Eliot interested Sayyab as well.
The
themes of death and resurrection, sacrifice and salvation,

and faith and grace, as manifested in the modern world,
also engaged Sayyab's interest in the Tammuz or Adonis myth,
which was central to The Waste Land and was to become
central to Arabic poetry of the 1950's and 1960's.
The hesitant plunge into modernism which Sayyab's world
73
was experiencing both on cultural and technological levels

in the 1950's, coupled with intense political strife and
all the attendant social problems, resembles in many ways
the turbulent state of affairs and state of mind which
beset Europe during and after the First World War, and
which produced The Waste Land.
After the Second World
War and the loss of Palestine, the image of a wasteland

reflected well the state of collapse and desolation in
which the Arab world was plunged.
To rally the Arabs'
faith in their future and restate an identity which had

become distorted by nationalistic pride, a personification
of the undampable hopes of the people was culled from their
own neglected ancient mythology.
While Westerners are
better acquainted with the Greek version of the Adonisl

Venus myth, Sir James Frazer recounts the origins of the
mythic cycle:
Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and
Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia rep
presented the yearly decay and revival of life,
especially of vegetable life, which they personi
fied as a god who annually died and rose again
from the dead . The worship of Adonis was
practised by the Semitic peoples of Babylonia and
Syria, and the Greeks borrowed it from them as
early as the seventh century before Christ. The
true name of this deity was Tammuz . In the
religious literature of Babylonia Tammuz appears
as the youthful spouse or lover of Ishtar, the
great mother goddess, the embodiment of the
reproductive energies of nature. 37
Each of the central group of five whom Jabra dubbed
74
the "Tammuzi poets" was a poet of independent stature,

following a diverse path of experimentation.
All were lite
rary critics of distinction, excepting Sayyab himself, whose

poetic use of the myth in the mid-fifties first sparked
widespread interest among them.
Until 1969 al-Khal edited
Shi'r magazine, during the years of its formative influence

on the Arabic free verse movement.
Jabra was the group's
most diversified artist, an accomplished painter, sculptor,

novelist, translator and short story writer, as well as poet
and critic; he has attained some prestige as a guest lec
turer on the British university circuit.
Hawi's adjustment
of modern metrics to the rhythms of folk songs, whose vari

ations are congenial to the Arab ear, has been much emulated
by younger poets in the 'sixties and 'seventies, as has his
simplification of poetic diction.
Breaking with
Shi~r
in
the mid-sixties, Adonis launched a new poetry magazine,

Mawagif [Stands] to disseminate his "rejectionist" philoso
phy, which incorporates many of the objectives of the French
surrealists.
He has since become an unrivalled force in
Arabic poetry, shaping the concepts of Arabic modernism of

the 1970's and 1980's.
Together, these five poets exerted a formidable influ
ence on modern Arabic poetry from the period of its emer
gence in the 1950's to the present.
The original Tammuzi
group dissolved by 1964, the date of Sayyab's death,
75
concurrent with the interruption in publication of Shi'r

magazine.
Each of the remaining four had, by then, entered
another stage of his artistic career.
But through them
the Tammuz imagery has left its permanent stamp on modern

Arabic poetry, and a tentative link between Eastern and
Western literature was formed.
It is, of course, a supreme irony that a generation of
Arab poets should have rediscovered their mythology through
Sir James Frazer and T.S. Eliot.
Yet it was not their
mission to rewrite The Waste Land in Arabic.
A fundamental
difference in stress between the English and Arabic inter

pretations of the Adonis myth, and of The Waste Land itself,
exists, and supports the contention that the spiritual
pessimism of much twentieth century Western poetry has
never quite infiltrated modern Arabic poetry.
Yet another facet of Eliot's appeal to Arab poets con
sists in his repudiation of materialistic philosophies.
Eliot espoused Anglican Catholicism, not as a religion
conceived as a wax museum of early Christian traditions and
rituals, but on the grounds of a Christian individualism
which envisions the founding of a humanistic society united
under God for the good, and betterment, of mankind.
The
Christ/Tammuz figure in Sayyab's "Christ After Crucifixion"

is clearly divine through his deep love for humanity, and
surrender of self to it:
76
I was like the shadow between night and day

Until I exploded my very being in a shower of treasures,
stripped it like fruit.
When I cut my pocket into swaddling clothes, and my sleeve
into a blanket
When I warmed the bones of the children one day
with my flesh
When I undressed my own wound to bandage the wounds
of others,
The wall fell between God and myself.
(p. 241)
The Tammuz imagery, concentrated in the second stanza of
the poem, similarly hinges on the concept of sacrifice to
the common good.
If the modern world is presently a waste
land, parched, soulless and infertile, it is envisaged by

the Tammuzi poet as being in the winter phase of the Tammuz
cycle, where the penance done by the god/hero in the under
world will one day issue in his joyous return to the face
of the earth, bringing the life-giving rain and sun,
covering the land with beauty and bounty.
Heroic sacrifice for one's people is an ancient ideal
of the Arab psyche which is very much alive today, and is
notoriously manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.
More
over, the Arab poet maintains a strong bond with the land,
a passionate sense of identification with it and duty
towards it.
As Sayyab's native village Jaykur enters the
poem, it "extends to the limits of the imagination,"

becomes a Bethlehem or a Biblos (the Phoenician city where
Adonis supposedly lived and died), and implicates the
sufferings of the poet himself with those of Christ or Tammuz:
77
When even the darkness of the night turns green
The warmth touches my heart, and my blood runs in
its soil
My heart is a sun when the sun throbs light
My heart is the earth, brings forth wheat and flowers
and pure water,
My heart is the water, my heart is a stalk of wheat
Its death is resurrection: it lives in him who
eats of it.
Juxtaposed to a poem in the vein of Hijazi's "We Have
Nothing" (1958; p. 207), where an intrusion of realism in
the form of hunger pangs jolts an idyllic depiction of
village life, or with Adonis's "The Crow's Feather," for
that matter, which depicts a parched city and countryside
awaiting a long overdue spring, Sayyab's lush dream of
Jaykur and concluding vision of the city's sufferings trans
formed into pangs of childbirth bear elements of a romantic,
as well as Edenic and apocalyptic, tradition.
There is, however, little of the conventional in
Sayyab's recourse to religion or romanticism.
Wrote the
Syrian scholar, Kamal Khayr Bek:

... Restlessness drove the Iraqi poet [Sayyab]
toward spiritual sources and primitive history
represented in mythology in the same way it did
Eliot. But while the Christian end is the victo
rious one to Eliot, Sayyab insisted time and again
on the human element in the resurrection. Poetry
seems to him to surpass religion in the process
of changing and bettering this world, which is
ruled by the logic of gold and iron, and repre
sents the hope for resurrection and 'the hope
that the spirit will awake in a world crushed by
materialism. ,38
78
Rather than exhibiting a naive optimism that if winter

comes, spring cannot be far behind in the affairs of state
as in the seasonal cycle, Sayyab's employment of the Adonis
myth functions as an oblique but rousing call for social
change, in the manner of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."
Infertility of the land is mythologically linked to an
incompetent and ailing ruler, as Northrop Frye pOints out,
and the role of the hero is to slay the monster which lays
waste the land and liberate the kingdom.
Significantly,
Frye infers that "the monster is the sterility of the land

39
itself . present in the age and impotence of the king."
Later traditions have attributed the desolation of the
land to a yet more menacing and tyrannic ruler--and thus
the modern Arab poet found ready to hand a means of
exposing social ills without being castigated by an into
lerant
r~gime.
"Christ After Crucifixion" is on one level
a religious poem, moving, immediate, and effective in its

own right, while on another level it affords a vision of
social change in a stage of completion.
Sayyab's aim was
not to provide a physical geography of the wasteland,

but encouragement and direction out of it.
Water, a life-giving but sometimes menacing element,
is an omnipresent image in the large body of poetry
influenced by the Tammuzi poets.
particularly abundant:
In Sayyab's poems it is
"Song of the Rain," "River of
79
Death" and "A City Without Rain" are the titles of only a
few which indicate a central preoccupation with water.
"Song of the Rainll (p. 243) contains all the submerged ele
ments of the Tammuz myth, and illuminates the dual value
of water, which may slake the thirst of the wasteland
only if its great blessing is fairly distributed.
So far from being the extravagant compliment of a love
poem, the opening lines of IISong of the Rain ll are the
speaker's address to his native Iraq, whose eyes, viewed
from across the bay, might quite literally be "two palm
forests at the hour of dawn ll and command the powers of
fertility to make lithe vineyards sprout leaves. 1I
From the
initial key of melancholy into which the water images of

the poem fall, more savage associations quickly build.
From the "fog of translucent grief" into which the eyes
sink in the opening lines to the clouds' downpour of
heavy tears, to the child's mother "eating earth, drinking
rain" on the hillside, to the sad fisherman who curses
the waters for his empty nets, the mood of desolation
gathers urgency:
Do you know what grief the rain sends?
And how the gargoyles whimper when it falls?
And how lost the lonely feel in it?
With no end--like spilled blood, like the hungry
Like love, like children, like the dead--the rain is!
From this point the water images become fretful and storm
80
charged, and the suggestions of blood sacrifice appear in

quick succession.
The blanket of blood which seems by a
trick of lightening to cover the land symbolizes the dire

plight of the people, who never tasted the harvest of
their fields (the "crows" and "grasshoppers" gorged instead
are parasitic politicians and their entourages), and whose
blood flowed copiously under the Nuri a1-Sa c id regime in
Iraq which came to a violent end in 1958, two years after
"Song of the Rain" was written.
The song of the emigrants--a song within a song-
reveals the irony of spring rain in a country whose poor
perenially hunger, and are driven to wrestle the turbulent
waters of the bay for their lives to flee the country as
political exiles.
Yet it is in their song, which ends as
a prayer of hope and thanksgiving to the "Giver of Life,"

that the joyful return of Tammuz to the earth is affirmed
as a certainty in "the world of the youthful tomorrow."
Upon this invocation, for the first time the bay responds
to the speaker's cry with something more than an echo,
searching among its store of gifts to cast upon shore
both sustenance, in the form of shellfish, and evidence
of its cruelty:
the bones of a drowned emigrant, the
symbolic Tammuz figure of the poem whose death is the price

of nature's bounty.
Despite the reiteration of the emigrants' faith upon
81
which the poem closes, it is obvious that the appeasing of

the waters is a task that will soon need to be begun anew,
for the mythical monster that besieges the kingdom and
requires the ritual sacrifice of its sons or daughters
has not been slain.
Sayyab has not strayed far from this
most elemental myth; the rain may fall, but Iraq is sucked
dry by a thousand small such monsters, "snakes" or men who
rob the nectar from each flower fed by the Euphrates.
notable discrepancy between Eliot's wasteland and Sayyab's

is that in Sayyab, the land generally continues to replenish
its wealth year after year.
waste a land of plenty.
It is man who is able to lay
The state of moral or spiritual
aridity into which a civilization has withered is not

necessarily mirrored in the infertility of the land; if
nature sympathizes with the affairs of man in a poem by
Sayyab, the medium is most likely to be water.
The benefi
cial rains may pour, but they pour tears: and the sea is
enraged against mankind.
(c) Modernism versus the Religious Sensibility?
Wishing to view a completed Tammuzian cycle in Eliot's
The Waste Land, Arab poets and critics have searched
assiduously for signs of promise and rebirth in the poem,
and have tended to overemphasize them where most Western
scholars have accepted a bleaker statement, turning to
Ash Wednesday and The Four Quartets for a prospectus of
82
salvation.
Despair is repugnant to the Arab psyche; a
damp gust is surely the prelude to a healing spring shower,

and there can be no such thing as "dry sterile thunder
without rain." Jayyusi links the dominant, ambiguous image
of water which she finds in The Waste Land with the central
image of rain in Sayyab's
Song of the Rain, without under
lining any possible differences in their conception.

"Although 'The Waste Land' is not a poem of despair," she
writes,
it stresses the living death of the crowd in the
'unreal city' and the horror of a disintegrated
life. Arab poets found in Eliot's implicit use
of the fertility myth an expression of ultimate
love and an emphasis on the potential of self
sacrifice. 40
Jabra's account of Eliot's influence on the Tammuzi poets
would support such a conclusion.
Also commenting that,
contrary to common opinion, The Waste Land is "not quite a

poem of despair," he discovers that
its final significance comes with what the thunder
said: Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata--Give, Sympathise,
Control. It is a meaning akin to love and sacri
fice, a meaning that has often been lost on the
critics of new Arabic poetry, but not on the poets
themselves. For them, love and sacrifice shall
bring fertility to the land, though they may both
come in lightning and thunder that rend the temple's
veil. The Cross thus came into Arabic poetry as
a symbol of great immediacy, and Christ and Tammuz
were made one, and the poet was identified with
them .. 4l
83
The most significant difference between the cultural

wasteland Eliot depicted and that of the modern Arab poets
is explained
in terms of the power exerted over their
respective societies by organized religion.
The chapel in
Eliot's wasteland is empty and bereft, a "home for winds,"

symbolizing the godlessness of contemporary European civi
lization.
In Arab countries, the strong traditions of
Islam maintain a vigil over the everyday actions of the

populace, and the spirit of skepticism which prevails else
where in the modern world is jealously curtailed.
As a
result of a society in which civil laws are often modelled

after religious ones, the regulatory functions of religion
sometimes overshadow the values of love and tolerance by
which it professes to abide.
Consequently, a new humanism
is sought by those who would reinstate spiritual values in

a society overly preoccupied with the forms of religion.
The figures of saints, prophets and biblical personages
are treated by the modern Arab poets in tones ranging from
admiration through irony and ambiguity to mockery, but win
sympathy mainly when they
ally themselves with the causes
and concerns of the common people, rather than acting as

the haughty spokesillen of the Almighty.
The saint in a poem
of that title by 'Abd al-Sabur--who maintained close ties

with the Tammuzi poets, and is heavily indebted to Eliot-
communes with "decayed bones and skulls" to learn that "the
84
truth of the world is in a calloused palm / And that God

has created man and gone to sleep" (p. 318).
He throws
his books in the fire, walks out into the street to join
in the mainstream of daily life, and invites "the poor, the
sick, the strangers / The broken-hearted and broken-limbed"
to eat from his table "a crumb from the wisdom of the ages /
dipped in the joyousness of our foolish age."
The concerns
of this saint's predecessors were vastly different:
they
devoted themselves to the linguistic complexities of

interpreting the Scriptures, forever multiplying the burdens
of the people with new religious exigencies, and scarcely
deigning to notice the strollers in the streets seeking
food or keeping lovers' trysts.
"Intellect," says this
unconventional holy man, "has blown our sails astray."

It is in keeping with 'Abd al-Sabur's theory of poetic
reform that religious reform should not be left in the hands
of critical onlookers, but spring naturally from the heart
of the tradition and take fresh root alongside it.
"The
contemporary poet must recognize his heritage, be steeped

in it until this heritage penetrates his soul," he declares.
Then, breaking through to a level of true creativity, the
poet experiences a conversion resembling that of ~bd alSabur's saint from the letter to the spirit of the law:
He must become a part of its whole, whereafter he
achieves a special way of writing. Generally at
85
this point the poet surpasses his heritage and

begins to add new elements to it, no longer
sheltering in its shadow but entering upon the
wide field of experience, where depth of feeling
precedes control of language. 42
The poets who desired to revolutionize Arabic poetry
in this century descended from and lived in a culture
shaped by the "inspired" where the Koran, as an inspired
book, dictates not only religious thought and guidelines
to life but, moreover, the political and social development
and mores of the Moslem world.
A scholar of French as well
as Arabic literary history, Adonis recognizes that the

development of thought in the West begins with the rational
enlightenment of the ancient Greeks, noted for their
intellectual flexibility and willingness to question and
test their beliefs.
In Islam the Word of God as revealed
to Muhammad is absolute and ageless, and it is man's urgent

obligation to fulfill that Word in a life ruled and inspired
by its original meaning.
In early Islam the common man had
very little to do with the political and social development

of his culture, which was directed by the chosen imam's,
successors and descendants of the Prophet.
This practice
is very little changed today.

The inflexibility of a world view in which rational
arguments for change are often overruled despite a blatant
and pressing need for it has necessitated the rejectionist
stance of Adonis, whose intellect is at odds with the rigi
86
dity of a culture for which he demonstrates a profound

attachment.
Few poets are as cognizant of their history,
or appreciative of the artistic achievements of Islam, as

is Adonis.
But if precedent does not accommodate the
physical and mental needs of modern man, then one's heritage

is no longer a precious possession:
it is one's jailor.
As discussed in the previous chapter, Adonis attempts to

counteract in his poetry the stasis and artistic constric
tion which is the adverse result of a world view centred on
inspiration, and hostile to progress.
(Of course, the
evils of a world view which emphasizes "progress" to the

neglect of man's intuitive, emotional, and irrational nature
is the converse dilemma experienced by Western man, and has
been explored in recent Western literature and criticism.)
Not for Adonis is the self-abnegation, the inner peace
crowning the battle with pain, so passionately embraced by
Sayyab's Job:
Thanks be to You, though the disease has been prolonged
And despite the tyranny of pain,
Thanks be to You! whatever You send is a gift
And catastrophies reveal Your benevolence.
(po 248)
The creation of Adonis's revolutionary hero "Mihyar" quite

early in his poetic career becomes a search beyond the
traditional religious sensibility into one which breaks
down set perceptions of a world divided against itself
87
into categories of good and evil, life and death, self

and society, etc .
Mihyar, anew Adam with a difference,
attempts to begin completely anew and look inwards for

definition of his world, rather than looking towards an
external, historical order for an authoritative definition
of himself.
He asserts his right to doubt, siding neither
with God nor Satan:

for both are walls, and block my sight.
And shall I exchange one wall for another?
Mine is the perplexity of enlightenment,
The perplexity of one who knows everything
).
Having
"burned his inheritance," reasserted the virginity of his

land and denied death, Mihyar shouts exultantly:
"There
is no Paradise, no Fall after me / And I erase the language

of sin"
("The Language of Sin," p. 282).
The path to change is, however, by no means a smooth

one.
Like the other moderns, Adonis finds that after burning
behind him the waxen Temples of tradition and rejecting its

dusty idols, not only does the new road lead to new obsta
cles and uncertainties, but there is great difficulty even
to establish its starting point:
where to begin"
"Road, you do not know
("The Road," p. 283).
The old bridges must
be burnt, but the problem remains of crossing the stream:

or, as al-Khal observes in a less jaded metaphor, "the old
88
is a burden on the new, and the new is an undeveloped

breast"
("The Long Poem," p. 259).
In the main, the modern Arab poets are neither hostile

nor indifferent to the religious sensibility.
Yet they
feel obliged to comment on religious tradition where it

has stagnated, become impervious to real feeling, or is
the tool by which certain political or religious leaders
serve their own ends.
While the Koran assures Moslems of
being "the best nation on earth," poets like Adonis,

Qabbani, al-Haydari, al-Bayati, Jabra and ~Abd al-Sabur
consult their social consciences and ask if this can be so.
They question the validity of a religion which can affirm
this in the face of continuous conflict, poverty and injus
tice.
The Torah, the Koran, and the New Testament alike fall
under Buland al-Haydari's reprobation in "Journey of the
Yellow Letters."
Intolerant and inhuman in their values-
or those their interpreters have fastened upon--these

yellowing letters oppose all progress in favour of lithe
long sleep of history," are in complicity with the Sultan's
whip, and impose the worship of frightful shadows upon the
credulous villagers (p. 128).
Yet, however bitter the
denunciation of the old religious way of life, one would

not conclude from reading the modern Arab poets that God
is dead, or that the world is without a prospect of salva
89
tion.
Side by side with the mocking expose of a false
prophet in Taqah's "The One-Eyed Liar" is the portrait of

the new holy man, who grapples with the problems of human
suffering and social evils:
'Abd al-Sabur's saint, Sayyab's
Job, and Adonis's humanistic Noah.
But the state of
vacillation between two worlds, one in which absolute.~t_are

given and one in which absolutes may not exist, is well
captured by Jabra in a dramatic monologue, "Beyond Galilee."
Here Jabra explores the figure of John the Baptist disillu
sioned in a tedious life after death, still attracted to,
yet questioning, the "unfamiliar fire" which had inflamed
his voice in the days when he raised his mighty shout in
the wilderness.
IIHave I come after death to listen to my
voice / Pulling me towards a long-deserted void?1I he wonders.

He calls for shade and ice-water, and asks, bewildered,
"For whom?
For whom / Have I closed my eyes, while on my
lips were / Those traces of honey and of hemlock?1I (p. 303)

Eliot's "Journey of the Magill sets a precedent for a
number of realistic and imaginative treatments of biblical
incidents or characters in modern Arabic poetry.
The grum
bling magus who narrates Eliot's poem paints a vivid pic

ture of the discomforts of the journey, the "dirty villages ll
and "hostile cities" encountered along the way--and yet
conveys the solemn nature of the change which that experi
ence had precipitated in his concepts of death and life.
90
journey two thousand years later through the metropolises

of the West is undertaken in Hawi's "The Magi in Europe,"
and leads to an ironically ignoble conversion.
The spiri
tual bankruptcy of the West, and the attraction of the

Arab who has lost his sense of cultural integrity for the
worst of ...-the dissipations of Western civilization, are the
-.;:.~.~
themes addressed by Hawi in this poem.
So far from being
oriental dignitaries, "wisemen from the East," Hawi's

modern magi are men from Bierut "with borrowed faces,"
"born tragedies."
They follow a disappearing star through
Paris, Rome and London only to find on Christmas Eve "no

children's faith in a child or a stable," but, in a London
brothel,
Earthly Paradise! Here is no snake to seduce
And no judge to throw stones
Here the roses have no thorns
And the naked are innocent.
(p. 270)
It is the chemistry of sex to which the godless civiliza

tion kneels in reverence.
Succumbing to this tempting form
of worship only compounds the vacuity of these perplexed

and faceless men whose pilgrimage to the "land of civiliza
tion" brings them little but disillusionment, and another
choice of masks to assume.
Whatever the problems of a culture caught in a stage
of transition between the old and the new, Qabbani's obser
91
vation, quoted earlier, that "the problem of futility,

nothingness, uselessness, is an imported psychological
problem" is confirmed by the prevailing tone of the poetry
represented in the present anthology.
A sense of expectancy
forms a common bond between poets drawn from diverse seg

ments of Middle Eastern society and possessed of disposi
tions contrasting so markedly as al-Mala~ika's and Hawi's.
Al-Mala'ika is essentially romantic by temperament, and
susceptible to a delicate gloom; Hawi's unalleviated vision
of death and decay in the old order is vented in a taut
succession of searing images, intellectually as well as
musically heightened, which leaves the reader emotionally
drained.
Nevertheless, there is an irrepressible buoyancy,
a sense of a purpose and order to life now obscured but not

altogether beyond recovery, underlying the gloomiest cata
logues of adversity penned by the modern Arab poets.
The
result is that a certain naivete will be detected by the

Western reader, accustomed to a climate of thought in which
atheism and existentialism, like sexual explicitness, are
no longer shocking, and whose personal crises are expressed
poetically with a more cautious (or, perhaps, more devious)
recourse to the basic emotions.
In a society which has much cause for despondency,
hope is never quite extinguished in the human community,
riddled as it is with vices and endless animosities; nor ir.
92
the power of the word to transform the world around it.

The most anguished poems are yet a cry, an appeal, a
rousing call upon the fellow feelings of the reader:
angry,
supplicative, or proudly declarative, but not an introspec

tive register of the bleakness or paralysis of life.
In
his poem "To the Reader," Darwish, for instance, addresses

his audience with the direct statement, "This is my suffer
ing,1I admonishes them to look elsewhere for pleasant enter
tainment, and claims, in no uncertain terms, that anger is
the wellspring of his art (p. 336).
In a poem of 1948,
al-Mala'ika entreats the reader more gently:

Let us be friends
In the spaces of this sad world
Where destruction walks and annulment
lives
In the corners of the slow nights
Where the frightful voices of victims
Mock all hope
Let us be friends-
Fate has fixed eyelids
Staring down the weary
In the roads of suffering .. 43
In the vision which next unfolds she descries sentience
returning to the hand of the murderer, sympathy to eyes
immured to the misery of others, and in simple fellowship,
an illumination of the vast scale of human suffering.
Khalil Hawi's poems, liThe Cave" and liThe Prisoner,1I
would seem to afford pictures of the most unrelieved pessi
mism.
In both poems the speaker is doomed to isolation and
93
a form of captivity, before which prospect all his lavish

dreams and ambitions fade, along with fond recollections
of a sane and wholesome existence:
liMy hand singing
to the grain" (liThe Prisoner," p. 272); "a spade, a field,

a library and a house"
(liThe Cave," p. 267).
What else
remains, inquires the speaker at the conclusion of "The

Cave," "but a hungry cave / Stagnant mouth / And a hollow
hand that writes and erases / The hollow lines in listless
motion?"
But a different light is shed on Hawi's recurrent
symbols of menacing enclosures (the cave, prison, slum, or

crumbling and divided house) in one of his best known
poems, "AI-Jisr" [The Bridge] .44
In an extended metaphor
in the best Tammuzi tradition, the ribs of the poet stretch

as a sacrificial bridge over the dark caves and slums of
the Old East towards a freer New East, which is no longer
divided against itself.
Here the poet is replete with the
joy of his sacrifice, for--as the perennial dream would

have it--the children of tomorrow will not submit to the
old forms of incarceration.
IV.
The Political Poem and the Resistance Movement

Arabic poetry has emerged over the period we may
roughly designate 1945 to the present as a poetry deeply

concerned with the human condition.
Its catchword, as
M.M. Badawi stresses in an article on the topic, was through
out the 'sixties "commitment,,;45 it might now be defined as

"change."
Few of the poets are inclined towards an Ivory
Tower introspection, a purely aesthetic, abstract, or aca

demic poetry.
For the past three decades, the majority
have remained haunted by the spectres of pressing social

problems.
It is the object of nearly every poet to reflect the
social, political and religious turmoil of the Arab world
in the twentieth century.
The prospect of harmonious
relations between Arab states of radically different

mentalities may be impossible for an onlooker to envisage,
yet the typical Arab poet considers himself the spokesman
not only of his region or country of birth, but of Arabs
from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans.
While he may him
self be a well educated man, he feels it his responsibility

to express the concerns of the ordinary man and to represent
the plight of a people struggling against political oppres
sion, poverty, illiteracy, and superstition.
Consequently,
the poet is more often to be found among the nonconformists

and liberal thinkers in his society than in government
95
endowed institutions or positions of security and prestige.

Following a revolution, the ascendance of a new regime is
often greeted with enthusiasm by the poets; but before
many years have passed the character of "political" poetry
in the country has turned from optimistic panegyric to
surreptitious satire or (usually in the case of exiled
poets) outspoken anger.
The latter is well typified by Sayyab's "Ode to Revo
lutionary Iraq," written on the occasion of the assasination
of the revolutionary dictator 'Abd aI-Karim Qasim.
few years previously, in 1958, Qasim had deposed King

Faysal's and his prime minister Nuri
aI-Sa cid' s regime,
only to impose a yet more ruthless one on the country.

Rejoicing at the news of Qasim's death and disgrace from
his London hospital bed, Sayyab wrote:
The agents of Qasim open fire upon the spring,
But all the illicit wealth they have amassed
Will melt like ice, to be again water,
Gushing along streams and brooks,
Bringing back the luster of life to the dry branches,
Restoring, without loss, all stolen from them
in Qasim's winter. 46
It is an occasion to excite the most emphatic language of
deliverance and reprisal:
"The enemy of the people is
cast down to the lowest hell"; "In my joy, I almost stood

up, walked, ran, / As if cured"; " ... Ta.mmuz, his splendor
once stolen by the traitor, / Has arisen, and Iraq is
96
reborn."
Extravagant and truculent this language undoubtedly
is:
it derives from the classical poetic genre known as
al-madih (l1panegyric lt ) and al-hija)
("lampoon"), into
which categories Arabic political poetry usually fell.
The
panegyric (al-madih) exalted the subject, a person of

prominence such as kings and military leaders, and politely
effaced the writer, who petitioned the eminent person for
a favour on his own behalf or that of his tribe.
The lam
poon (al~hijaJ) may be understood as the contrary of al-madih.

A fiery and self-righteous speaker would denounce and sati
rize the enemy or offending party, urging his audience to
retaliate against the injustices done them or to rejoice
at the downfall of the tyrant.
In "An Ode to Revolutionary
Iraq" the lavish praise is bestowed upon the revolutionary

army which overthrew Qasim; vindictive epithets are not
spared in reference to the defeated enemy; and the poet
himself, who could not be expected to brandish a sword
from his sickbed, assumes a role which is just as patriotic
in its pathos.
While the modern Arabic poem which addresses a poli
tical theme may display new forms and new poetic techniques,
and to various degrees adopt a contemporary diction, in
tone and in content it has changed very little from the
traditional poetic genres.
Elements of al-madih and al-hija'
97
will be observed throughout the specimens of political

poetry in the present anthology, although care has been
taken to select those which are fresh and imaginative in
conception, and whose value is poetic, rather than merely
dogmatic.
A significant degree of evolution in the modern
poem is, in fact, discernible in the new poets' frequently

self-critical survey of Arab affairs.
Praise is no longer
delegated exclusively to one's friends, compatriots, and

mentors, nor blame exclusively to the opposition.
It is "the people"--mute, hungry, bewildered and
oppressed--who have inherited the poet's ancient tribal
loyalties, and to whom the poets vie to give a voice.
Scenes
of strife are depicted on a homely front as well as in the

limelight of political events which move nations:
Between walls
there are lean young fingers
wasted with loneliness and longing
and the day's fatigue.
The shy wife does not refuse,
not a word does she say ...
And tomorrow the fields will shiver.
The fireplace
is a shivering infant's mouth;
the evil moon
creeps through their window and rests
on the heads of five little ones
eating dreams on a straw mat.
("A Birth" by Isam Mahfuz; p. 327 ).
Needless to say, the
poet may face grave consequences for speaking his mind upon
issues of particular tension in too obvious terms.
Yet no
98
matter how repressive the regime in any given Arab country,

the poet usually finds a way to articulate his dissent.
Often, like Adonis, Qabbani, Darwish, Sayyab, and al-Bayati,
he takes refuge in another Arab country whose ideology
opposes that of the one in which he has been banned.
Thus,
ironically, a system of free artistic expression is

repeatedly wrenched from the very fact of disunity in the
Arab world.
If the Arab poet takes pains to ground his poetry in a
living culture and proclaim its experience, even on occasion
jeopardizing himself to speak out for his people, he is
rewarded by the fact that Arab audiences do listen to their
poets, whether it be to applaud or to condemn.
Well known
as a people swayed by poetic oratory of surpassing beauty

and strength, the Arabs have a long history of veneration
for this, their major art form.
Writes H.A.R. Gibb, in his
historical survey of the literature:

Even down to the present day, the apt use of words
has remained the supreme art of the Arabs, exerting
upon them an almost uncontrollable emotive power,
and the inexhaustible richness of their language is
a source of pride. Among the pre-Islamic Arabs,
words in themselves seem to have retained something
of their ancient mystical and magical power; the man
who, by skillful ordering of vivid imagery in taut,
rightly nuanced phrases, could play upon the emotions
of his hearers, was not merely lauded as an artist
but venerated' as the protector and guarantor of the
honour of the tribe and a potent weapon against its
enemies. Tribal contests were fought out as much,
or more, in the taunts of their respective poets as
on the field of battle, and ~o deeply rooted was the
custom that even Muhammad, although in general hos
tile to the influence of the poets, qimself conformed
to it in his later years at Madina. 4
99
Today, though his influence is thought to be dwindling,

the poet still fulfills this role in some capacity.
Politi
cal parties often attract lesser poets to sing something

akin to the old tribal panegyrics, and a single poet has
been known to incite a throng of listeners to take decisive
action.
A cry like Qabbani's in "Margins on the Book of
Defeat"--"We need an angry generation"--is quite likely to

arouse latent anger in the hearts of his readers, who
have also had enough of deferring to the whims of a "Sultan"
(or a king or a president) whose soldiers would force a
poor man to "eat of his shoes"
(p. 164).
Modern Arabic poetry advocates more than literary

change.
The poet has his context in a society that is
immensely proud of its history and language, yet is other

wise weakened by fragmentation and seemingly unable to
resolve its differences.
Desiring to believe in the good
ness of his people, he is yet aware that their complicated

factional hatreds and endless quarrels over which political
or social system to adopt tear them apart and enable foreign
forces to take advantage of their disunity.
Sometimes the
solution would appear to be shifting the blame squarely

onto authoritative shoulders--those of the leaders, who,
with tempting promises, divert the energies of the gullible
masses from their more honourable ends.
Kamal Nasir's poem,
"The Leaders of My Country," (p.
100
383) projects the poet's desire to act as the candid chro

nicler of his country's history, despite an intense emo
tional involvement with the sUbject.
His aim is to reveal
the source of its social evils to the "perplexed masses,"

whom he perceives as honest, innocent, intoxicated by a
laudable dream of freedom, but grossly deceived and misled
by their leaders time and again.
An appreciation of the
dignity, even the magnificence of the people's struggle

against corruption, treachery, servility and humiliation
exists side by side with an ironical recognition of the
heroic excesses of their tradition.
"When I write the
history of my country," the poet declares, flI will weep

over a page for the people flooded with glory / an immortal
red page in the book of freedom I blazing with heroism,
wasted in sacrifice and martyrdom."
Far from being white
washed by a sense of national pride, the pages of history he

proposes to write include a dark "page of confusion,"
"page wearied by nights of tattered mourning," one that

"exposes the secrets of corruption," and a "black page oozing
treason."
The rise of Arab nationalism in the early twentieth
century, at first a reaction against European colonialism,
was destined for confrontation with the parallel rise of a
Zionist movement.
The resultant Palestinian tragedy affected
not only Palestinians.
It prompted widespread self-exami
101
nation and questioning among all the Arab states.
Raising
discontentment with a number of regimes throughout the

Arab world which were, in fact, little better than the
Israeli's over the Palestinians, it served, along with
other traumatic events in Arab history of the following
two decades, as a catalyst for change.
The conviction
grew that the time to cease sleeping "the long sleep of

history" was at hand, as Buland al-Haydari insists in "The
Journey of the Yellow Letters" (p. 128).
Consequently, Arab
society from Algeria in the north to the Yemen in the south

is presently undergoing a great many radical transformations
to determine its stance in a rapidly changing world.
While
its need to honour the old ideals is great, so is the need

to adopt modern technological means--simply to keep up with
the spirit of the age, apart from basic economic concerns.
But no specific revolution in the Arab world seems
capable of bringing about widespread, thoroughly effectual
changes.
Countless so-called revolutions have taken place
in the past forty years, none of which has managed to

implement its vision of a just society.
Social differences
exist as always between the extremely poor and the rich,

the left and the right, the educated and the illiterate,
North African and Asian Arabs, advocates of different
religions or religious sects, between men and women, and,
moreover, between one Arab state and another.
No other
102
region in the world has experienced as many wars as the

Middle East in this period, and the scars left behind do
not seem to heal, but linger painfully.
It is well known, for instance, that since 1948 there
have been five major wars between the Arabs and Israelis
alone.
The creation of an Israeli state in the heart of
the Arab world and the dislocating of the Palestinian people

is arguably the most significant event the Arabs have
experienced in this century.
And defeats in wars subsequent
to 1948 have left the Arab individual--more specifically

the Arab poet--in a state of shock, examining and becoming
increasingly skeptical about the validity of his social and
political systems.
It is the poet's task to elucidate this
fiasco, and wrest some sort of shape, some rhythm or meaning,

out of the disintegration of an old order founded upon
nationalistic illusions.
can no longer stay serene:
Even the poets of love and erotica

Nizar Qabbani's scathing
"Marginal Notes on the Book of Defeat" (1967) criticizes a

nation whose warfare consists of the "Eastern cults of
rhetoric / And heroism, which never killed a blackfly";
whose logic is "the logic of the drum and the rebab," and
whose leaders "have lost the war twice / because [they] have
stood apart from every human condition" (pp. 160 and 164).
When England took the problem of Palestine to the United
Nations in 1947, and by recommendation of the U.N. more than
103
one million Palestinians were dispersed throughout the

Arab world to live in permanent refugee camps, two distinct
poetical streams were created.
One is of young poets born
or growing up under the Israeli regime, where Palestinians

remain second-class citizens cut off from their own culture,
and whose children grow up poorly educated in their history
and traditions.
These are at the heart of the "resistance"
movement, intent on rekindling the spirits of outside Pales

tinian supporters when the menace of pessimism or resigna
tion looms.
They keep the issues alive, revitalize them
with an artistry born of tragic experience, and attempt to

transmit a faithful picture of their situation past official
censors to the outer world.
Besides running the blockade
of strict censorship which extends to the banning of books,

newspapers and poetry readings, they face imprisonment
and extradition for speaking out.
Even lamentative poetry
may be considered as subversive to the state as a political

demonstration.
Of poets translated in the present study,
Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Tawfiq Zayyad, and Sadiq al

Sa~igh
belong to this group.
Their work claims a significant
place in the third and final body of translations in this

anthology, which also incorporates the poetry of Palesti
nians living in neighbouring countries at the time Palestine
was partitioned, such as Kamal Nasir, Tawfiq Sayigh, and
(Izz aI-Din al-Manasira, as well as that of the West Bank poet,
104
Fadwa Tuqan, who has lived under Israeli occupation since
1967.
Despite the close supervision imposed upon their
work, the new generation of Palestinian
poets living inside
,
Israel does not seem to write in artistic isolation from
their contemporaries elsewhere in the Arab world.
It is
surprising how many ideas from this outer world have crept
into the poetry of al-Qasim and Darwish in particular.
One
may assume that a substantial amount of this literature has

filtered through to these poets in their prisons and isolated
communities, as they have proved well able to join and con
tribute to modernist movements in the Arab world, exempli
fying in their poetry a difficult balance of spontaneity,
musicality and directness with seriousness of theme.
Confined to certain agricultural and manual occupations,
Arabs living within Israel are viewed by their technologically
advanced Israeli neighbours as somewhat savage, unacquainted
with industrialism and scientific progress, and, like all
Arabs, uninterested in peace and always preparing for war.
As in ancient times, the poem is a valued item in the
arsenal employed by the Arabs to alter the boundaries of
their world.
It is now the contemporary world of ideas that
the Arabs are intent on conquering, and Darwish counters

this backward image of his people with news that the Arabs
know how to do more than handle a sickle, or how to resist
105
in isolation.
In fact, they practise such civilized arts
as making modern factories, houses, hospitals, schools,

48
bombs, missiles, music--and beautiful poems.
The latter
accomplishment is evident, for although in the main Darwish's
tone is that of the most angry and incisive revolutionary,
he is capable of writing such haunting lyric passages as
this:
Soft rain in a strange autumn
And the windows are white, white
And the sun is an orange grove in setting,
And I am a stolen orange.
Why do you run from my flesh?
I want nothing
From the country of knives and birds
Except my mother's scarf,
And reasons for a new death.
("Soft Rain in a Distant Autumn, II p. 337).

It is remarkable that the Palestinian poets, who as a
group have suffered most both physically and psychologically,
and whose subject is most naturally death, tragedy and
defeat, are on the whole the least susceptible to despair.
As labourers, wanderers, and periodically prisoners, the
hope of reconstructing a homeland at some time in the future
is a lifeline, however tenuous.
The buoyant spirit which
characterizes the best of the IIresistance li poetry translated

in the present work indicates a final point reached on the
emotional scale following such a personal or national
disaster.
The lowest key registers the initial sense of
106
grief, loss, longing and incredulity; next is the tone of

anger, bravado, and defiance; and indignation finally gives
way to determined self-reliance, with the firm hope of having
past wrongs eventually redressed.
Until such time, the
resurgence of life begins to take form in the community of

the dispossessed.
Even so grim a poem as "The Rock" by
Fadwa Tuqan (p. 365), which conveys the raw essence of the
solitude, powerlessness and dejection experienced by a
prisoner or an exile, admits a glimmering of light in the
consciousness of this brotherhood:
r smell the elixir of consolation
in the misery of prisoners like me,
prisoners of fate.
r came among the people
where tragedies are,
and tears
where the whips sizzle and fall
over the hordes,
over the naked backs
and the crushed necks ...
Hope for the resurrection of Palestine is often symbo

lized by the
reu~ion
of families and especially of lovers,
since the personification of one's country as a lovely young

girl or fruitful woman, a lover or wife, is a common device
in Arabic poetry.
Samih al-Qasim avails himself of this tra
dition in a number of poems, some of which may be read simply

as love poetry, but invite a second level of interpretation.
"Come, Together We Shall Draw a Rainbow"
example of the kind.
(p. 349) is a fine
The character of the beloved is not
107
clouded or abstracted, but given immediacy with recollected

dialogue, and individualized with a wistful touch:
-- Who are you? Are you a sister forgotten
By my mother in her bed, on the night of departure
And later sold to the wind and carried
Across the door to the great exile?
Clues that the identity of the beloved may not be that of
a specific woman are yet suggested throughout the poem:
Which sister are you, among the thousands of
prisoners
Who knew my face and called me lover,
Whom I took in my arms?
The following lines are especially revealing, as they asso

ciate "captured vines" and ruined towers with the beloved:
You said to me, "In what land did the wind cast you
So shamefully, twenty years ago?"
I said, "In the shade of your captured vines
And on the ruins of your towers where pigeons live!"
Thus the refrain
projecting the lovers' meeting after the
anguish of defeat and long years of imprisonment, shame

and expiation, acquires a wholly new significance:
And you shall give me a child
And we shall call her, "Ruin"
And you shall give me a bird and a
jasmine
And a book of poems.
Another group of poets affected by the partitioning of
Palestine in 1948 consists of a generation which had matured
108
befere the creatien ef the State ef Israel.
The majority
ef these preferred to. seek a greater freedem ef expressien

in exile, and dispersed ever the Arab werld, Eurepe and
the Americas.
Many teek advantage ef the United Natiens'
aid to. refugees er used their ewn reseurces to. further

their educatien in fereign ceuntries, thus enlarging their
knewledge ef werld literatures and breadening their habi
tual themes.
Jabra, Tawfiq Sayigh, and Mucin Basisu have
been particularly successful in their effert to. pertray the

universal experience within and beyend the Palestinian
experience.
In itA Traffic Light" (p. 373), fer instance,
Basisu expresses disenchantment with the quality ef life

effected thus far by "pregress" fer the average man.
Trapped and dictated to. by the red and yellew lights ef a
half mechanized seciety, the subject ef the peem has no.
ether shelter than a breken-dewn jalepy, a dingy symbol ef
the age in which he is bern, passes the greater pertien ef
his life, and dies.
The fact that a life cenfined within
this vehicle witheut a destinatien ceuld also. be interpreted

symbelically as Palestinian hemelessness adds yet anether
level ef meaning to. the peem, but is net essential to. its
appreciatien.
The poetry ef Tawfiq Sayigh is so. far remeved frem the
general thrust ef the "resistance
merits a category ef its ewn.
ll
mevement that it really
Rather, I have chesen to.
109
conclude this anthology with his long poem, "Out of the

Depths Have I Cried to Thee, 0 Death" (p. 391).
Urgently
concerned with themes of love and betrayal, alienation and

death, Sayigh's poetry shares the emotional intensity of
Khalil Hawi's but lacks Hawi's overly meticulous diction
and staccato rhythms.
In its sensitivity to the rhythms of
modern speech, Sayigh's poetry approaches the virtuosity of

al-Maghut's.
Alienation in Sayigh is a deliberate stance, not the
result of frustration with one's countrymen as in Jabra and
al-Maghut, nor the necessary isolation of creativity self
imposed by a poet aspiring to such an artistic mission as
Adonis does.
Sayigh's is closer to an existential isolation,
neither feeding upon hopes for the redressing of particular

wrongs in society nor upon sacrifices to the advancement of
art.
He is cognizant of the fact that his state of exile as
a Palestinian is not much different from the state of

bereavement and aimlessness of godless modern civilization
at large.
In "Out of the Depths," the cry for freedom and remis
sion of sins is no longer addressed to God; nor is He the
merciful one so eagerly awaited.
The opening line of Psalm
130 has undergone a startling alteration in the title of

the poem, with the substitution of the word "Death" for the
word IILord."
With a sense of urgent expectancy that is
110
lover-like and sexual as well as apocalyptic, the speaker

of the poem invites a young white mare, supreme above all
others, to claim him on a furious journey.
He begs the mare
not to take him through the tempting fields of life, a laby

rinth composed of every scene of human frailty and folly,
corruption and tribulation:
Do not steer me
To the bloody fields
Where life is exchanged
For a medal, a leader's speech
And the newspapers' hubbub; do not take me
To fields where the stench of heroism,
nationalism and duty
Masks the spread of hatred
So that it pours
Only upon the enemy;
And do not take me to the unpatrolled
Fields of my blood
Where I have no ally ..
The fields of my blood! Mouths
That cannot drink enough
Of the blood from old men's dried veins,
Of the blood of girls who have known blood
only in the cheeks
And have not known it yet as a slow trickle;
Of the blood of heroes that rains dirty as a
bull's urine
And the blood of syphilitics that trickles
Filthily drop after drop;
Of my friends' and neighbours' blood,
Of my wife's blood
And that of the child on her arm, and another
unborn ....
Nowhere more keenly than in Sayigh's poetry is one made
aware that in the midst of continuous political turmoil,
and despite the most rigorous enjoinments of a strong reli
III
gious establishment, the Arab poet experiences what every

modern poet in the world must.
He cannot shut out a sense
of loss, and general disorder.
Entrance to the age of
mechanization has its psychological price:
inroads have
been made in the social structure, confounding the ordinary

and familiar, threatening a way of life consecrated by
tradition.
Idols have been smashed, heroes disgraced, abso
lutes overturned.
Tragic surprises abound in Arab society.
Beneath the determinedly hopeful front which Arab writers on

the whole present, confusion and skepticism loom, and it is
necessary to combat that "foreign" attraction to nothingness
and disbelief in an informing purpose to life.
Notes
on-the Introduction
1 "Layali Kiliubatra" was originally published in

Taha's volume of poems, Zahr wa Khamr [Flowers and Wine],.
(1943).
See Diwan 'Ali Mahmud Taha (Beirut:
'Awdah, 1972), p. 471.
Dar al
This excerpt, and subsequent
citations from poems or critical works written in Arabic,

have been translated by the present author.
2 Lughat al-ShiGr al-'Arabi al-Hadith IThe Language
of Modern Arabic Poetry]
(Alexandria: al-Hya?ah al-Misriyah
al- cArnmah, 1977), p. 66.

3 Al-Rihlah al-Tharninah: Dirasat Naqdiyyah [The Eighth
Journey:
Critical Studies], 2nd ed.
(Beirut:
al-Mu'assasah
al-(Arabiyah lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 1979), pp. 14-15.
4 l.'b'd
l.
5 "Macrakah aI-Yamin wal-Yasar fi aI-Shier al-cArabi ll
[liThe Battle of the Left and the Right in Arabic Poetryll] ,
Majallat al-Ma~rifah l I s t issue (Damascus, March 1962),
p. 99.
6 See English translation of poem on p. 339 of the

present work.
Subsequent references to these translations
will be incorporated in the text.

7 Al-Thabit wal-Mutahawwil [The Mutable and the Irnmu
table], Vol. III: - Sadmat al-Hadathah [The Shock of Moder
nity], 3 vols.
(Beirut:
Dar al-'Awdah, 1978), p. 19.
113
BIn Khamsat Dawawin 1i1-'Aqgad [Five Volumes of Poetry

by a1-'AqqaQ]
(Cairo:
a1-Hay'ah a1-Misriyah a1-'Ammah
1i1-Kutub, 1973).
9A1-Shier a1-Hurr, Qadaya Wamawaqif
Issues and Stands]
(Cairo:
[Free Verse:
a1-Hay~ah a1-Misriyah a1-~Ammah
1i1-Ta'lif wa1-Nashr, 1971), p. 23.

10
Quoted by Ghazi Barakis in "Al-<Awami1 al-Tamhidiyah
1i-Harakat a1-Shi'r al-Hadith Mundhu a1-Qarn a1-Tasi'
'Ashar
Hatta Nihayat al-Harb aI-'Alamiyah al-Thaniyah" [liThe Primary

Factors in the Modernist Movement in Poetry from the Late
Nineteenth Century to the End of the Second World Warn], in
Shier [Poetry magazine], 4, No. 16 (Beirut: 1960), 114-130.
11For example, the influential critic Ja1i1 Kamal
aI-Din, in AI-Shier a1-~Arabi a1-Hadith waruh a1-'Asr
[Modern Arabic Poetry and the Spirit of the Age]
c
Dar aI- I1m
(Beirut:
1i1-Ma1ayin, 1964).
12MM Badawi, A Critical Introduction to Modern

Arabic Poetry (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), p. 226.
13Sa 'at Bayn a1-Kutub [Hours Among Books]
(Cairo:
3rd ed.
MatbaCat a1-Sa c adah, 1950).
14Al~Shicr Misbah Akhdar [Poetry, A Green Lantern],

2nd ed.
(Beirut:
a1-Maktab a1-Tijari, 1964), pp. 37-38.
15'b'd
pp. 40-41.
~.,
16Qissati Ma'
ed.
(Beirut:
aI-Shier [My Story with Poetry], 1st
Manshurat Nizar Qabbani, 1973), pp. 179-1BO.
114
l7Al-Hadathah fi al-Shier [Modernity in Poetry]

(Beirut:
Dar al-Talicah lil-Tiba'ah wal-Nashr, Dec. 1978),
p. 46.
l8'b'd
~.,
p. 15
19Qadiyyat al-Shier al-Jadid [The Present Situation of
the New Poetry]
(Cairo:
1964), pp. 98 ff.
Institute of Higher Arabic Studies,
See also his chapter on "Nazik al-Mala'ika
and the New Poetry," pp. 161-227.

20
See, for a more exhaustive discussion, Salma Khadra
Jayyusi's chapter 8 on "The Achievements of the New Poetry"

in vol. II of Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry,
2 vols.
(Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1977), specifically Section
1 on "Form," pp. 605 ff.

21Introduction to Tufulat Nahd [The Childhood of a
Breast]
22
(Beirut:
Dar al-Kutub, March 1960), unpaginated.
Trends and Movements, p. 688.
23The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

York:
Random House, 1951), p. 391.
(New
First pub. 1948.
24Written in 1958, the poem, "Marthiyat al-Ayyam

al-Hadirah," can be found in vol. II of Adonis's Diwan
[Poetic Works], 2 vols.
(Beirut:
Dar al-~Awdah, 1971).
An English translation by Samuel Hazo exists in The Blood

of Adonis:
Transpositions of Selected Poems of Adonis (Ali
Ahmad Said), introd. Mirene Ghossein (Pittsburgh:
Univ. of
115
Pittsburgh Press, 1971).

25"What is Modern about Modern Arabic Poetry?" in
Al-CArabiyya [The Arabic (Language)]
(Chicago:
American
Association of Teachers of Arabic), No. 14 (198l),p. 56.

26'b'd
]. ].
27"The Perplexity of the All-Knowing:
A Study of
Adonis," in Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Litera

ture, ed. Issa J. Boullata (Washington D.C.:
nents Press, 1980), pp. 308-309.
Three Conti
The article was first pub.
in Mundus Artium, 10, 1 (1977), 163-181.

28History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the
Present, 10th ed.
p. 90.
(London:
First ed. 1937.
MacMillan & Co. Ltd., 1970),
I am indebted to Prof. Hitti's
standard reference work for the historical dates appearing

in the present study.
29Al-Usturah
Poetry]
(Baghdad:
1978), p. 25.
fi Shier al-Sayyab [Myth in al-Sayyabrs

Manshurat Wizarat al-Thaqafah wal-Funun,
A discussion of each of their contributions
appears on the pages following (25-46).

30 In the introduction to his book of poetry, Al-Yunbu c
[The Stream] (Cairo: MatbaCat al-Ta'awun, 1934), p. "ya'."
31
Al-Ustu+ah fi Shier al-Sayyab, p. 21.
32Quoted by Mahmud al-CAbtah in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
wal-Harakah al-ShiCriyah al-Jadidah fi al-CIraq [Badr Shakir
al-Sayyab and the New Poetic Movement in Iraq]
(Baghdad:
116
Matba'at al-Ma'arif, 1965), p. 82.

33 A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry
(London, N.Y., Melbourne:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975),
pp. 223-24.
34t1Modern Arabic Literature and the West," in Critical
Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, p. 12.
a lecture delivered at five British universities:
Originally
Oxford,
Cambridge, Manchester, Durham and London, under the auspices

of the Fifth of June Society, Beirut, and published in
Journal of Arabic Literature, 2 (1971), 76-91.
35A Critical Introduction, p. 224.
36 TO mention only a few sources of interest, see Fa~iq
Matta's study, Eliot (Cairo:
Dar al-Macarif bi-Misr, 1966);
Jabra's Al-Rihlah al-Thaminah: Dirasat Nagdiyah [The Eighth

Journey: Critical Studies]; or Mahir Shafiq Farid's article,
tlTa~thir T.S. Eliot fi al-'Adab al-<Arabi al-Hadith"
[tlEliot's
Influence on Modern Poetry"] in the Egyptian magazine Fusul,

Vol. I, No.4 (Cairo:
July 1981), pp. 173-192.
In English:
M.M. Badawi's A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic

Poetry; Nazeer El-Azma's article, "The Tammuzi Movement and
the Influence of T.S. Eliot on Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, " in
Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, pp. 215
231, reprinted from Journal of the American Oriental Society,
88 (1968), 671-678.
37
The Golden Bough:
A Study in Magic and Religion,
117
1 Vol., abridged ed.
Macmillan & Co., 1940), p.
(N.Y.:
325. First pub. 1922.

38Harakat al-Hadathah fi aI-Shier al-'Arabi alMucasir [The Modernist Movement in Contemporary Arabic
Poetry]
(Publications orientalistes de France, 1982),
p. 47.
First pub. in French in 1978.
39Anatomy of Criticism:
Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 189.

40
Trends and Movements, p. 724.
4lllModern Arabic Literature and the West," p. 15.

42Qira'ah Jadidah li-Shicrina al-Qadim [A New Reading
of our Old Poetry] (Cairo:
Dar al-Katib al-'Arabi lil
Tibacah wal-Nashr, 1968), p. 15.

4311Linakun 'Asdiqa)
II
["Let Us Be Friends"], in Shazaya
wa-Ramad [Splinters and Ashes]
(Beirut:
Dar al-'Awdah, 1949).
44see Issa J. Boullatats English translation in

Modern Arab Poets: 1950-1975 (Washington, D.C.:
tinents Press, 1976), pp. 36-37.
Three Con
Hawits poem was originally
published in Beirut in 1961.

45"Commitment in Contemporary Arabic Literature," in
Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, pp. 23
44.
Reprinted from Journal of World History, 14 (1972),
858-879.
46 This English translation appears in An Anthology of
Modern Arabic poetry, selected, ed. and trans. by Mounah A.
118
Khouri and Hamid Algar (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:

Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 91.
47Arabic Literature:
An Introduction, 2nd ed.
(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, Oxford Univ., 1963), p. 29.

48..
.,
c
Quoted by Raja~ al-Naqqash in JUduba Mu asirun
[Contemporary Writers]
Tibacah, 1972), p. 190.
(Baghdad:
Dar al-CArabiyat lil
PART TWO:
AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN ARABIC POETRY,

1945-1984
Selected and Translated
by John Mikhail Asfour
with Biographical Notes, o n the Poets
I. The Free Verse Movement
(a) A "Generation of Departures":

Some Early Modernists
121
Nazik al-Mala'ika
(1923
Born in Baghdad to a prominent family (her mother was
the poet Salma 'Abd al-Razzaq), Nazik al-Mala'ika graduated
from the Teachers' Training College in the same city with an
Honours B.A. degree. In 1950 she went to the United States
to attain a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from
Princeton University.
.Later she returned to Iraq to
take up a position as assistant professor in Education at

the University of Basra, and proceeded to establish a brilliant
literary and academic career as one of the original poets and
critics of the free verse movement in the Arab world.
The
keynote of her poetry is the disappointment and bitter
ness of an Arab woman whose fundamental outlook was shaken

when she discovered the imprisonment and subjection Arab
women by and large accept as their lot.
Her second collection of verse, Shazaya wa Ramad [Splin
ters and Ashes] (1949) was truly revolutionary in its tech
nique as well as in form and diction.
al-Sayyab and Buland al-Haydari,
Along with Badr Shakir
al-Mala~ika
was conscious
of ushering in a new age and a new movement in Arabic poetry,

despite a pronounced lingering affiliation with the Romantic
poets which evidenced itself in mood and tone, and a prepon
derance of natural description in her highly subjective, melan
choly verse.
Other collections include
Qararat al-Mawia
[The Bottom of the Wave] (1957), Shajarat al-Qamar [The Moon
122
Tree] (1968), and Ma>sat al-Hayah wa-Ughniyah lil-~Insan

[The Tragedy of Life and a Song for Man] (1970).
She has also
published an influential study of the free verse movement,

Qadaya aI-Shier al-MuCasir [Issues in Contemporary Poetry]
(1962), and a number of other critical works.
Al-Mala'ika
later came to feel that the original tenets of
al-shi~r
al
hurr -[metrical free verse] had been interpreted with too much
license by the new generation of poets, and advocated a
return to the conventional graces of metrical poetry.
123
When I Killed My Love
I hated you, till nothing else was
But my terrible hate.
Into it I poured tomorrow's blood,
And drowned my present.
Fires I fed it, of sins, of anger, of
revolution-
Inflicted my cries of disgust upon it
in my dark song-
Sustained it with the sleep of the dead,
And drew a curtain of ghosts and gloom
around it.
I cursed your name,
The shadows and echoes.
I loathed the colour and tune,
Rhythm and form,
The rough memories, and that adulterated phrase
Which fell, was consumed
And knelt with eternity in one moment:
And I composed a fresh poem
Where the past is only a word.
Victory when you fell
As a statue to the pit!
... /
(" When I Killed My Love")

124
I came to bury the pieces under the grief of

the cypress.
Hungrily my spade split the earth,
And touched beneath
A cold and frightful foot.
I emerged, happily dragging to the light
--But who?
All that remains of the corpse

of regret ...
The night was a mirror, where I beheld my hatred

And my dead past, but not what I am.
I discovered,
The hour I killed you in my cup one night
And bore my murdered slowly to the grave-
Discovered, by the lugubrious hue of my face
That I had only killed myself.
- by Nazik al-Mala'ika
(May 12, 1952)
125
Let Us Dream Together
Come and dream, the evening is here

The gentle night with the lips of sleep is calling us
Come, we shall chase and number the threads of lightning
We shall make the sandhills witness our love
On a sleepless island together we shall walk

And leave our fugitive steps on the sand
Morning will find us with its cool dew
And wherever we dream a single rose will spring to life.
We shall dream
That we climb to explore the mountains of the moon
And play by ourselves with the loneliness of eternity
Far away where no memories can reach us
Where we dwell beyond the limits of the mind
In dream
We shall be metamorphosed into two children on the hills
Innocent, we will run over the rocks and feed the camels,
Fugitives with no house but a shelter for dreams
And as we sleep we will dip our bodies in the sand
.. ./
("Let Us Dream Together II)
We shall dream
That we walk to yesterday and not tomorrow
We shall reach a Babel with the dew at dawn
Two lovers carrying the oath of love to the temple
Where a Babylonian priest will bless us with a holy hand
- by Nazik aI-Mala Jika

(Sept. 28, 1948)
126
127
Buland al-Haydari
(1926-
An Iraqi poet born to a Kurdish family, Buland

al-Haydari began his literary career with a group of artists
called "The Lost Time Group," where he exchanged his aspira
tions and ideals about modernizing not only poetry, but art
in general.
As such, he was attracted to the poetry of the
Lebanese Abu Shabakah, who, along with certain other Lebanese

and Egyptian poets of the late 'forties,
was
with the traditional elitist poetry and was
dissatisfied
attempting to
make poetry both relevant and accessible to the average man.

A communist sympathizer and political activist like many other
Iraqi poets of his generation, al-Haydari was exiled and
fled to Lebanon
al-cUlum.
where he became the editor of the journal,
His volumes of poetry include Khafqat aI-Tin [The
Throb of Clay] (1946), Aghani al-Madina al-Mayta [Songs of the

Dead City] (1951), Ji'tum ma' al-Fajr [You Came with the Dawn]
(1961), Khutuwat
fi~l-Ghurba
[Steps in Exile] (1965), Rihlat
al-Huruf al-Sufr [Journey of the Yellow Letters] (1968) and

Aghani aI-Faris al;"'Mutc:.ab [Songs of the Tired Kni.ght] (1971) .
Al-Haydari's poetry features a vivid flow of images,
almost pictorial in impact.
It avoids the elegant mannerisms
of poetic speech and succeeds in making plainness of expres

sion beauty of expression.
One of the pioneers in the free
verse movement, al-Haydari made interesting use of interior

monologue and psychological conflict in an innovative and
creative form.
128
Journey of the Yellow Letters
For a thousand years, children of my poor village

We have been the yellowed letters
In the Torah
And the Koran
And the New Testament,
The chisel
Carving frightful shadows in your eyes-
Shadows you
Worshipped in your hearts,
Shadows that made inhuman history ...
Each letter swells, and sometimes is
A minaret that stands in prayer,
A church, sometimes, in the dreary mountains,
Sometimes black nooses
And death robes.
In the
village your streets know them,
Your sins know them.
For a thousand years
We have been the yellowed letters in the New Testament
And the Torah
And the Koran,
The letters of sin
Daily present
In every shameful pregnancy,
... /
(" Journey of the Yellow Letters" )
In the idols,
In the sultan's whip
In God, in Satan
But not once in a man
For a thousand years, children of my poor village

We have slept the long sleep of history
And worshipped our frightful shadows in your eyes
- by Bu1and a1-Haydari
(Sept. 1968)
129
130
The Failure of Ancient Man
Sister, I prayed until my unconscious

guilt became prayer
Fasted until dry-lipped
And I said:
In
the lips,
In the wood stacked for winter I have a God

I am a cloud from his generous hand
And I am the brown sands' dream of water
From even aridity I make life explode
Life nailed the cross to each forehead

And each hour crucified Christ
And each moment crucified his corpse
His skies dawned in my pain
And on my dried eyes fell his light
A story of a wanderer swallowed by his steps
--And, Sister, I bore my wandering within
I prayed
Fasted
Lost myself, and became a god
The guilt in my unconscious became prayer
And my lips dried
Sister, here I am, dying
Like the god who dies in exile
(" The Failure of Ancient Man")
And I am only a step

Planted in the sand
To dream of the water
- by Buland al-Haydari
(Sept. 1968)
131
132
Waiting Sails
Morning, if you return

you will find me wearing all my faces
sails awaiting the wind,
awaiting departure
for a shore without pearls, without seashells
only
storms and hunger
and the legs of men
sinking to a death in the mud,
diving beyond night and day
as though the veins
would sprout roots and branches
and fruits
so as to light the eyes of the young
with a legend
about legs which sprout in the mud
on a shore without pearls or seashells
with only storms and hunger
and the legs of men
Morning, if you return

you will find me as a rowboat, as a ship,
as the wind
as a sailor
... /
( " Wai ting Sails")
you will find me shining in the eyes of the young

as though I were
the roots, the branches and the fruits
- by Buland al-Haydari
(Sept. 1968)
133
134
'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati
(1926
'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati is regarded as one of the most
"committed" Arab poets and as a leading figure in the socialist
realist movement in modern Arabic poetry.
After his gradua
tion from the Teacher's Training College in Baghdad, the city

of his birth, and a short career as a teacher and then jour
nalist, he was forced to leave Iraq due to his communist
beliefs and
wander
throughout a number of Arab and Eastern
European countries.
He lived and lectured at the Asian Peo
ple's University in Moscow for a time; hence much of his poetry

has been translated into Russian and Chinese.
Among his wide
readings al-Bayati familiarized himself with such socialist

writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Louis Aragon, Federico Garc{a
Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Paul Eluard.
Bayati's first book, Mala)ika wa Shaya~ [Angels and
Devils]
(1950) follows the romantic tradition, but a change
is to be observed in his poetic style

attitudes
as well as in his
after his reading of the socialist writers.
'Abariq Muhashshama [Broken Pitchers]
In
(1954) a more profound
and disturbing metaphoric language emerges along with an

awakened interest in social criticism.
He has since published
some twenty volumes of poetry, most of which are collected in

his three-volume Diwan (1971).
In his later poetry, a burning
optimism that social ills can and will be abolished by revolu

tionary means gives way to a quieter voice enriched and deep
ened by disillusion and the tragic complexity of experience.
135
Broken Urns
God and the blazing horizon, and the slaves

test their chains:
It
Build your future cities
on the brink of Vesuvius;

Set your sights
on the far side of the stars!
Let violent love ignite
flames in your breast, and profound joy."
And those who sell their eagles in the market writhe with
hunger, and demi-men,
single-eyed, are bereft on the new crossroad:
" The bat must have
a night!
and if the morning comes
the ewe forgets the face of the aged shepherd
and the son, his father's; and the bread wet with tears,
the taste of ashes is his, and a glass eye
in the head of a dwarf denies the blazing light."
And widows follow the demi-men
under the sky, without a tomorrow, and without graves
under the sky, without a tomorrow, and without graves
God and the blazing light, and the slaves test their chains:
A new stream! a spring bursts out in our lifeless living
a new spring
let the dead bury their dead
.. ./
136
(ItBroken Urns"--con' t)
and torrents sweep over

these ugly urns, and the drums sound
and the doors shall be open to the rising sun and the spring
- by ~Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1954)
137
a traveller without luggage
from nowhere
I have no history, no face, from nowhere
under the skies in the wailing of the wind I hear it
call me:
"Come!"
no face, no history .. I hear it call me:
II
Come!"
across the hills

men cross the swamp of history
numerous as grains of sand
and the earth has remained, and the men have remained
tricked by shadow-play ..
the swamp of history, the unhappy land
and the men still are
across the hills
and perhaps I have passed thousands of nights
and vainly heard it in the wind, calling: "Come!"
across the hills
I, and the thousands of years
sad, bored, yawning
from nowhere
under the skies
inside of me a self dies, hopelessly
I and the thousands of years
sad, bored, yawning
. . ./
(" a traveller without luggage")
138
I will be! it is futilei I will always be from nowhere

the light strikes me, with the noise of the city from afar
the same life that repaves its streets
with a new pessimism
stronger than stubborn death
a new pessimism
.. and I walk with nothing, and the thousands of years
nothing awaits a traveller but his pitiful present,
mud and clay-
and the eyes of the thousands of grasshoppers, and the years,
and the walls of the city appear
--what do I seek?
in a world which persists in living with the hateful
past, and does not say "Oh"
alive on carcasses with perfumed foreheads
the same life
the same life that repaves its streets with a new pessimism
stronger than stubborn death
under the skies
hopeless
inside of me a self dies
like a spider
my self dies
and on the wall
... /
(" a traveller without luggage")
139
the light of day

sucks my years, spits them as blood, the light of day
absolutely, this day was not made for me
the door has been closed! this day was not made for me
I will be! it is futile, I will always be
from nowhere
- by cAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1954)
140
Ilyas Abu Shabakah

(1903-1947)
Born in America while his parents were visiting in New
York, Ilyas Abu Shabakah was brought up in Lebanon and educa
ted in CAynturah College, where he studied French as well as
Arabic literature.
After a short time as a teacher he took
up journalism and wrote short articles for numerous Lebanese

and Egyptian newspapers.
He wrote a booklet of criticism on
the intellectual relations between the Arabs and Europe, Rawa

bit al-Fikr wal-Ruh bayna l-'Arab wal-Faranjah (Beirut, 1943)
and articles on Lamartine, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Dante,
Petrarch, Hugo, Valery,
Byron, Shelley, Tennyson and Browning,
besides numerous translations of French literature.

Shabakah's poetry is prominent in the romantic tradition
which predates the Arabic free verse movement;
It deals with
pastoral and mystical themes, lust and the idealization of

women and love, intense exploration of one's inner life, and
the journey from a tempestuous state of mind towards total
accord with the beautiful and harmonious in the universe.
Sha
bakah has been included in the present anthology due to his

influence over the succeeding generation of poets in his atten
tion to interior monologue, simplification of poetic diction,
symbolic density, and the realistic treatment of many areas
of life.
Of particular interest are his books, al-Alhan [Melo
dies] (1941), Nid~ al-Qalb [The Call of the Heart] (1944), and
Ghalwa)
(1944)--an anagram on Olga, the name of his beloved.
141
Evening Prayer
Bow down to God, 0 my soul,
The evening is come.
The peasant has returned
From the ripe fields,
In his hands, the harvesting scythe
And the long shovel,
And on his shoulders a bundle
Of heavy grain.
He is tired, and in his eyes
Are traces of the day's heat.
Bow down to God, 0 my soul;
Bow down to God
Before the ghosts of fog
Move into the valleys
And, for awhile, leave off
Remembrances of_suffering, and summon
Memories of better times.
Your past was never sad
Or trembling, like the present
Bow down to God, 0 my soul;
. .. /
(" Evening Prayer")
142
Listen to the bells toll

In the belfry of the nuns' convent:
The valley carries their echo
To god-fearing souls.
Such sounds of tenderness
And the remains of sighs
The nuns of the convent offer
At the foot of the cross!
Bow down to God, 0 my soul
The evening is corne.
- by Ilyas Abu Shabakah
(1941)
143
Lewis 'Awad
,
(1915 J
An Egyptian poet, critic and editor, Dr. Lewis cAwad was
educated at Fouad I University in his native country and pro
ceeded to Cambridge and Princeton.
He is arguably the precursor,
if not initiator, of the Arabic free verse movement; cAwad's

experiments in free verse predate those of al-Sayyab and
al-Mala~ika,
but met with a less favourable reception among
critics suspicious of his "westernized" critical stands.
His
book, ?Ard Bluto wa-Qasa'id )Ukhra [Plutoland and Other Poems]

(Cairo, 1947) features poems written in free verse, half of
them in literary Arabic and half in the Egyptian vernacular.
cAwad dated a good many of these poems as far back as 1938,
the majority having been written over the years of his
studies
at Cambridge University in England, where he had been
exposed to the influence of T.S. Eliot.

Well versed in the history of western literature as well
as in Arabic, cAwad was intrigued by the achievements of
the Italian poets in their use of a modern poetic idiom
freed from the conventions of the Latin language.
also intrigued by
He was
the departure of the Arab Andalusian poets
from the established Khalili meters, and came to believe

that poetic language must be adaptable to the sensibility of
the age.
Consequently, he became interested in the attempt
to introduce the vernacular into Arabic poetry, rejected the

permanence of the classical prosodic system, and attempted to
reproduce in Arabic a variety of novel poetic genres, including
the short narrative poem, the ballad and the sonnet.
144
Love in st. Lazare
In Victoria Station I sat, a spindle in my hand-

Odysseus' spindle.
Forgive me, reader, if we disagree
for I have seen them, I have seen the Argos.
They were mostly women wearing
pantaloons and rubber shoes.
But we--you and I, and the lonely Prufrock
have the spindles to amuse us,
and between one thread and the next we raise our eyes to
the waves on the horizon, as they could be carrying the Argos;
and in the morning when the waves on the horizon become waves
on the shore, we see the face
of joy.
I sat, spindle in hand, waiting for Penelope, whom I
didn't know.
Had she come to gate number eight?
Penelope had not come to gate number eight.
On this forsaken island I saw the ships come laden
to the harbour
I saw ships carrying perfumes, lumber and myrrh
I saw ships carrying slaves to the market
near the place Wilberforce was born
I saw ships carrying fish to the trains and sugar to Morris
Island; cotton and onions to Egypt; tea to China and opium to
. . ./
("Love in st. Lazare")
145
India; parrots, elephants and cosmetics to the two Arctics;

machine guns
to enemies and friends alike-
But I did not see the Argos aboard.
- Lewis (Awad (1947)
146
Michel Trad
Michel Trad is a Lebanese poet notable for writing

principally in the dialect. As such, he follows a rich tra
dition of Lebanese folk poetry which has produced many
excellent lyricists and song-writers, including the famous
Rashid Nakhla (d. circa 1940). It has also strongly influenced
the writing of such poets in the mainstream of Arabic lite
rature as Al-Akhtal al-Saghir (1884-1968).
This lyric tradi
tion emphasizes pastoral and romantic themes, combining a

robust love of life with a sensitive apprehension of beauty.
In form and in language it has always run counter to classi
cal Arabic verse in seeking simplicity and integrity of
expression.
The zajal is its characteristic form, composed
of an elemental meter arranged in quatrains rhyming aaba or

abab.
Trad has ventured further than most folk poets in his
attempt to elevate the zajal to a tighter and more satisfying
art form.
Each of his poems seeks to establish its autonomy:
to construct its own world, its own history and mythology.

Like his predecessors, however, Trad focuses more upon the
unity and coherence of the poem than upon sharpness of imagery
and ideas.
Along with Sa<id cAql and the Rahabani brothers,
who have also written extensively in the Lebanese dialect,

Trad has helped to improve and perpetuate this regional poetic
form.
His lyrics reach a wide audience through renouned
vocalists like Fayruz and Wadi' al-Safi.
His publications
include Jilnar (1953) and Dulab [The Wheel] (1957) .
147
It's a Lie
Lies!
What lies!
They're saying the moon brought me a doll,

threw it like a bouquet through the window
That with one hand he set
two daffodils in my hair,
exploring my chest with the other
and said it was hot,
let's unfasten two buttons
That he sprayed my shirt with wine
and behind the trees
on the crossroad
unbuttoned my shirt
seemed annoyed, and flushed
And I still didn't know what was going on
--what was happening to my chest?
Among all the tulips,
among the blue dewdrops,
the moon himself has hidden
a pair of small birds
- by Michel Trad (Winter 1957)
148
Shadhil Tagah
(1929-1974)
Born in aI-Musil, Iraq, Shadhil Taqah graduated from
the Teacher's College in Baghdad with a B.A. in Arabic
Literature and returned to teach that subject at secon
dary level in his home town.
He wrote for local newspapers
in his spare time and published his first book of poetry,

Al-Masa) al-'Akhir [The Last Evening] in 1950, consisting
largely of free verse.
A school textbook entitled Fi Tarikh
al-'Adab al-'Abbasi [In the History of the Abbasid Literature]

followed in 1953.
Taqah returned to Baghdad to work for the
Ministry of Education in 1958, but a year later was imprisoned

for his membership in the socialist Arab Ba~th party.
After
the revolution of 1963 he became General Director of the Iraqi

News Agency, and published
Mata
anoth~r
collection of poems, Thumma
l-Layl [Then the Night Died].
In 1968 he began a
weekly column in an English language Baghdad newspaper, The

Observer, and, following yet another revolution, became the
Deputy Minister of Information in Iraq.
Taqah's third volume
of poetry, Al-)A'waru d-dajjal wal-Ghuraba j
[The One-Eyed Liar
and the Strangers] appeared in 1969, the year he was appointed

Iraqi ambassador to the Soviet Union.
In June of 1974 he
became Foreign Minister of Iraqi in October he died of a

heart attack while attending a meeting of Arab foreign minis
ters in Morocco.
Taqah proved adept in the invention of varied rhythmic
149
patterns and irregular rhyme schemes in the form of metri

cal free verse.
He found his poetic voice in the developing
tradition of the major Iraqi poets of his generation-

chiefly al-Sayyab and al-Bayati,
who shared his frustration
with an Arab world that resisted all incursions of the

modern age to revel in the glories of the past.
150
The One-Eyed Liar

I
They say
one day a false prophet
will come to us
bringing the grown-ups sugar and cakes
and sympathy,
enticing the children with broomplants and ambergris
He will talk and talk
and point out a mountain of rice
where he will lead
the hungry, and weep
But his frozen tears will not flow far
and the distant rice will be hard to find
though hungry armies journey to the mountain
the sun scorching their souls by day, and the lonely hills
beckoning with rice, cakes and sugar,
broomplants and ambergris
without end.
Only a mirage will be there-
only a mirage.
II
And they say

the false prophet is fat and one-eyed
and none of the skeptics was on earth at his arrival
except two blind men, and a very old one who was clever
( " The One-Eyed Liar" )
151
in his history
There was a madwoman, and her lover too
and there was a lady singer who wearied of the riights,
wearied of men's love
and wearied of this new triumphant prophet!
III
They say
the Singer asked him,
strange prophet who has come among us,
descended and ensconced
in our midst
Come to my tavern,
drink my wine,
speak to us-
and we shall sing and play and drink.
IV
And they say
in the tavern that sleeps
on the top of the hill
pleasure and drink undid the prophet's secret
And while the men slept
he bared his heart to her:
there was a confession
. and a defeat
and how victorious the singer!
(" The One-Eyed Liar II
152
v
They say
such and such, and the inevitable happened
In the morning a cross was planted on the hill
a false prophet dangling from it
with his second eye plucked out!
- by Shadhil Taqah
(June 1965)
153
Nizar Qabbani
(1923
Born in Damascus, Nizar Qabbani graduated from the
College of Law of the Syrian University in 1945 and proceeded
to rise in the diplomatic service to the rank of ambassador.
Over the years his posts took him to many cosmopolitan centres,
from Beirut and Cairo to London, Peking and Madrid.
Enjoying
unparalleled success as a popular poet allover the Arab

world, he has now relinquished his diplomatic career to devote
his time to his private publishing business in Beirut.
Although Qabbani has been an influential proponent of
free verse since the mid-fifties,
some of his poems are still
written in the traditional meter.
In language they are
unquestionably modern; Qabbani's experimentation with idioma

tic Arabic and the introduction of elements of folklore into
"serious" poetry was contemporaneous with similar efforts on
the part of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Buland al-Haydari.
In mid-life Qabbani's reputation as a great love poet became
secondary as themes of political significance emerged in his
work, following the catalytic events of 1967 in the Arab world.
Adept at igniting controversial issues
and outspoken in his
censure of irresponsible politicians, Qabbani lost none of

his readership in the transition.
and murder of his son
The unexplained kidnapping
and the recent death of his wife in
the bombing of the Iraqi embassy in Beirut in 1981
have
compounded Qabbani's sense of national tragedy with deep
154
personal tragedy.
Among Qabbani's many publications are Qa1at 1i a1-Samra~
[The Golden Skinned Girl Said to Me] (1942), Tufu1at Nahd
[Childhood of a Breast] (1948), Qasa)id [Poems] (1956),
Habibati [My Beloved] (1961), Hawamish c a 1a Daftar a1-Naksa
[Marginal Notes on the Book of Defeat] (1967), Shu (ara~ a1
Ard a1-Muhta11a. A1-Quds [Poets of the Occupied Land:
Jeru
salem] (1968), Qamus a1- CAshiqin [The Dictionary for Lovers]

(1981), Ash'ar Majnunah [Mad Poems] (1983), and
A1-Hubb
La Yagif 'ala a1-Daw" a1-Ahmar [Love Doesn't Wait
at the Red Light] (1983).
Qabbani's critical discussions of
poetry include A1-Shi'r Misbah Akhdar [Poetry, A Green

Lantern] (1964), A1-Kitabah CArnal Inqi1abi [Writing is Revolu
tionary Work] (1978), and Ma Huwa a1-Shi cr? [What is Poetry?]
(1981) .
155
Bread, Hashish, and One Moon
When the moon rises in the East

and the white roofs fall asleep
under heaps of flowers
The people leave the shops and walk in groups
to meet the moon
They carry bread and radios and drug paraphernalia
to the mountaintops
They all sell, they all buy fallacies
and illusions . and they all die
so the moon may live
What does a disc of light do?

to my country
the country of the prophets,
country of the naive,
tobacco-chewers and merchants of drugs
What does the moon do to us?
So that we lose our pride
and live to besee-cl1 the heavens .

What do the heavens have?
-- for the lazy, for the feeble
Those who would die so the moon may live
Those who supplicate the graves of the sorcerers
to grant them rice, and children:
... /
(" Bread, Hashish and One Moon" )

156
They unfold the fine striped mats

and they toy with an opium we call fate
or destiny
in my country--in the country of the naive.
What weakness, what decay

bewitches us as the light pours down
so that the mats, and thousands of baskets
and teacups, and children, occupy the hills?
In my country
where the simple weep
and live for the light they do not see
In my country
where everyone lives without eyes,
and pray,
commit adultery
and live as parasites
from birth
They call on the crescent moon:
" Oh crescent moon,
Oh wellspring of diamonds
and hashish, and encephalitis:
Oh marble crucified god,
Incredible one!
May you live long for the East, and for us,
... /
(" Bread, Hashish, and One Moon n
157
a cluster of diamonds
the millions whose senses have been dulled."
In the nights of the East and when

the moon becomes full
The East is stripped of all dignity
and initiative to struggle
for the millions who run barefoot
and who believe in having four \vives
and in the Day of Judgement,
Those millions who enjoy the taste of bread
only in the imagination
And who in the night dwell in
cough-ridden houses,
Have never known the solace of medicine
and resemble corpses under the light
In my country
and die, weeping
Whenever the face of the moon appears to them
they double their cries
Whenever a humble lute moves them
in the singing of "Laialy II and "Laialy" -
that lethal chant which in the East we call
" Laialy"
In my country
... /
(" Bread, Hashish and One Moon" )
158
in the country of the simple
where we chew those long songs,
II
Tawasheeh,"
That consumption which ravages the East
Those long songs
thoughout history, the ruin of our East
with the lazy dreams
and disordered nonsense .
Our East.
The East which looks for all heroism
in the legend of Abu Zayd al-Hilali.*
- by Nizar Qabbani (1955)
*A tenth century A.D. Arabian warrior-poet, one of the tribal

leaders of the ambitious banu-Hilal of al-Hijaz, who led
his tribe to victory in the invasion of Upper Egypt.
His
epic poetry about the tribe's battles and his personal duels
is representative of a decline in quality of classical
Arabic verse, although it has perpetuated a body of popular
legends around his name.
159
Marginal Notes on the Book of Defeat
My friends, I lament the old language
And the old books.
I lament
Our perforated words, like old shoes,
The phrases of debauchery, slander, and insult.
I lament
The end of thought which led to this defeat.
II
Salty are the poems in our mouths,
Salty the braids of women,
And the night, and the veils, and the buttocks.
Salty are things before us.
III
My poor country,
You have altered me in a moment
From a poet who writes of love and longing
To a poet who writes with a knife.
IV
Since what we feel is bigger than our books
We should be ashamed of our poems!
.../
("Marginal Notes ... ")
160
It is not strange that we should lose the war:
We entered it
With all our Eastern arts of rhetoric
And heroism, which never killed a blackfly.
We entered it
With the logic of the drum and the rebab.
VI
The secret of our tragedy is
That our screams are louder than our voices
And our swords taller than we.
VII
The situation
Can be summarized in a phrase-

We have worn the skin of civilization
Over a pagan spirit.
VIII
Victory cannot be achieved
With a flute and a pipe!
IX
Our improvisation has cost us
Fifty thousand new tents.
. .. /
("Marginal Notes ... ")
161
Do not curse the skies
If they forsake you
Nor circumstance,
For God grants victory where he will-
And you have no blacksmith to make swords.
XI
It pains me to hear the news in the morning,
It pains me to hear the barking.
XII
The Jews did not cross our borders
But crept
Like ants through our shame.
XIII
For five thousand years
We have lived in a crypt
Our beards long, our currency unknown
Our eyes inlets for blackflies.
My friends,
Try to break the doors down!
Try to wash your thoughts, wash your garments.
My friends,
Try to read a book,
. . ./
("Marginal Notes .... ")
162
To write a book,
Plant letters, pomegranates, grapes,
Sail to the countries of fog and snow!
Noone knows you outside your crypt.
The people there think you wolves.
XIV
Our skin is dead to feeling,
Our spirits complain of bankruptcy,
Our days rotate between visits, chess, and naps.
Are we " the best nation ever created"?
Our spilled oil in the desert could have
Served as a flaming dagger .
But,
To the shame of the nobles of Quraish,
To the shame of the free of Awse and of Nizar
It is poured under the slave-girls' feet.
XVI
We run in the streets,
Ropes tucked under our armpits.
We are clumsy carpentersi
We smash the glass and the locks.
We praise like frogs
We curse like frogs,
... /
("Marginal Notes .. ")
163
We make heroes of our dwarves
And cowards of our nobles.
We set up straw heroes ..
Idlers,
We sit in mosques
Scan verses, or compose proverbs
And beg victory over the enemy
From the hand of the Almighty.
XVII
If someone would grant me dispensation-
If I could interview the Sultan,
I would say to him:
Oh my master Sultan,
Your ferocious dogs have torn my garment.
Your agents are always behind me,
Their eyes behind me,
Their noses behind me,
Their feet behind me.
Like ineluctable fates
They interrogate my wife
And write in their books
The names of my friends.
Master Sultan,
Because I approached the mute walls of your city-

Because I
Tried to reveal my grief, and my distress-
... /
("Marginal Notes .. ")
164
I was beaten with a shoe.
Your soldiers forced me to eat of my shoe!
master,
My master Sultan,
You have lost the war twice
Because half of our people have no tongues.
What is the worth of a people without tongues?
Half of our people
Are beseiged like ants and rats
Inside the walls.
If someone would grant me passage
Through the soldiers of the Sultan
I would say to him:
You have lost the war twice
Because you have stood apart from every human

condition.
XIX
We need an angry generation.
We need a generation that ploughs the horizons
And excavates history from its roots,
Excavates thought from the depths-
We need a future generation
With different features
That does not excuse mistakes, does not forgive,
Does not bow down
And has not learned to lie.
. .. /
165
We need a giant
Generation
Of departures.
XX
Children,
From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, you are
the green wheat:
You are the generation that will smash the chains,
Snuff the opium in our heads
And kill the illusions.
Children, you are--still--innocent
And, like the dew, pure;
Do not read about our defeated generation.
Children,
We are failures . useless as watermelon rinds,
Decaying like old shoes.
Do not read our news,
Do not revere our monuments,
Do not accept our ideas.
We are the generation of influenza, syphilis,
and tuberculosis;
We are the generation of imposters, dancers
on the ropes.
Children-
. .. /

166
Spring rain, shoots of hope!
You are the fertile seeds in our barren lives,
The generation to defeat defeat.
167
Jerusalem
I cried till there were no more tears

I prayed till the candles melted
I knelt till kneeling bored me
I asked about Muhammad in you, and about Jesus.
o Jerusalem, City which smells of prophets
Shortest of roads between the earth and the sky
o Jerusalem, lighthouse for ships
Beautiful girlchild with burnt fingers
Your eyes are sad, City of the virgin,
Luscious garden where the prophet passed!
The stones of the streets are sad,
The minarets of the mosques are sad.
Jerusalem, beauty wrapt in black,
Who rings the bells in the Church of the Resurrection
On Sunday mornings?
Who carries the toys to the children
On Christmas night?
Jerusalem, city of griefs-

Large tear that roams under the eyelids-
Who repulses
Your enemies, 0 pearl of religions?
Who washes the blood from the stones of the walls?
Who salvages the Bible-

Who salvages Christ from those who killed Christ?
~vho
salvages man?
... /
(" Jerusalem H
Jerusalem, my city
Jerusalem, my love
Tomorrow, tomorrow the orange trees will bloom
And the green wheat will rejoice
And eyes and olive trees will laugh
Migrating doves shall return
To the purified roofs
And the children will come back to play
Fathers and sons will meet each other
On your tall hills, my country,
Country of peace and olive trees
168
169
The Dictionary for Lovers
I have always thought of writing a dictionary

for lovers
My friends, the lovers
I've always thought of making them happy
Those marvellous people
I have always thought of lighting a small lantern
For the lost thousands
Of making my heart
A field of wheat for all the hungry
I have always thought of making my eyelids
A sheet to throw over the weary
And of finding out
Where the birds of sadness come from
And when the trees of grief blossom
I have always thought of discovering what fire
has burned us
For millions
Millions of years
,-
I have, without a doubt, been a big fool

Calling myself
The official spokesman of lovers.
Is it possible that it can happen-
Is it possible to imprison the sea in a bottle-
Imprison jasmine?
... /
(II
The Dictionary for Lovers")

170
Is it possible to distill the flowers of love
In one book?
I ask mercy from the God of all!
171
Unemployed
If I hadn't encountered your lovely face

I wouldn't have been a writer of poems
If I hadn't kissed you from head to foot

The world, my love, wouldn't have known the history
of kisses
If I hadn't drawn your beautiful body in my poems

The children would never have known the shape of the
honeycomb
If I hadn't worked as a farmer

In the field of your eyes, I would have been unemployed
172
Love Compared
My lady, I am nothing like

Your other lovers.
If another gave you a cloud

I will give you the rain
If he gave you a lantern

I will give you the moon
If he gave you a branch

I will give you the trees
And if another gave you a ship

I will give you the journey
- by Nizar Qabbani (Sept. 1981)
173
The Latest Book of Poems
In your eyes the wheat and the waters burn

All the far clouds rain
And the birds come from the seaside
They carry the latest book of poems

And they know five new languages
- by Nizar Qabbani (Sept. 1981)
174
The Nipple
Sway, and rebel
cluster of silk
smile ofa bird
o swing of scents
letter of fire, swimming
In a pool of perfume
Whispered word
Written with light
Brown, or red, or
The colour of my feelings
A tiny bare tear

In a submerged theatre
Or a frozen kiss
In your little breast
A spark that appears

With a frightful noise
.. ./
(" The Nipple ")
175
A blonde umbrella against

The heat of the sun
Gathered, held
In a silvery bed
A pitcher of flame, suspended

On two hills of joy
Or are you a shutter of love

Emblazoned with designs?
A fever of blood set
In colourful pageant!
A butterfly with wings

Dipped in a stream
A star with feathers

Broken on the rocks
Warm, as though
Cast on my consciousness
seed of pomegranate,
Go mad, and play, and swing
... /
(" The' Nipple" )
And rend the silk
o paramour o.f silk
176
I.
(b)
Explorations in Modern Forms and Idioms:

Non-Metrical Free Verse
178
Muhammad al-Maghut
(1930
A Syrian born poet now residing in Lebanon, Muhammad al
Maghut possesses a highly individualistic talent in the
field of his literary experimentation, non-metrical free
verse.
His inventive use of poetic language juxtaposes the
traditional poetic idiom with modern colloquial speech in a

startling manner, giving maximum effect to unusual images
and intentionally mixed metaphors.
This electric imagery
spotlights serious social themes as well as self-directed

satire.
The result is poetry that is by turns realistic,
preposterous, and tragic; it mirrors unflinchingly the

personal tension and anxiety that Arab youth live in.
AI-Maghut's best known publications include Huzn fi
Daw' al-Qamar [Grief in the Moonlight] (1959), Ghurfa bi
Malayin al-Judran [A Room with Millions of Walls] (1964),
AI-Farah Laysa Hihnati [Joy is Not r,1:y profession] (1970) ,
and a poetic play entitled AI-cUsfur al-Ahdab [The Hunch
backed Bird] (1967) .
179
When the Words Burn
Poetry, this immortal carcass, bores me.
Lebanon is burning-
It leaps, like a wounded horse at the edge of the desert
And I am looking for a fat girl
To rub myself against on the tram,
For a Bedouin-looking man to knock down somewhere.
My country sinks,
Shivering like a naked lioness
And I am looking for two green eyes
And a quaint cafe by the sea,
Looking for a disappointed village girl to deceive.
The goddess of poetry
Stabs my heart like a knife
When I think I am singing poems to an unknown girl,
To a voiceless motherland
That eats and sleeps with everyone.
I can laugh till the blood runs from my lips.
I am the lethal flower,
The eagle that swoops on his prey.
Arabs-
Floury mountains of passion,
Fields of blind bullets-

Do you want a poem about Palestine, full of wheat
and blood?
. . ./
(" When the Words Burn" )
180
I am a strange man, I offer my chest to the rain
And in my absent eyes
Are four injured nations searching for their dead.
I was alone in my bed and hungry, tossing like a silkworm,
Listening to sad music,
When the first shot was heard.
The desert deceives us!
Whose death is this purple death,
And who tends the flower so carefully under the bridge?
Whose are these graves bowing under the stars?
Yesterday, a thin-lipped hero returned

To these hoary breasts,
These heaps of sand which give us
A prison or a poem every year
Bringing the wind, and broken cannons
His long spear gleaming like naked daggers.
Give him an old man, or a prostitute;
Give him these stars, and all the sands of Jewry
Where we weep over the mountains
And yawn in bathrooms,
Where I turn my treacherous eyes towards the sea.
Here
In the center of my forehead, where hundreds of words
are dying
I invite a final bullet.
. .. /
( If
When the Words Burn" )
181
My brothers,
I have forgotten your features.
(Those seductive eyes!)
Feur weunded continents crewd in my breast
I expected to conquer the world
With my poetic glances, and my green eyes.
Lebanon .. white weman under the water;
Mountains of horses and holy boeks.
Scream, voiceless ceuntry!
Raise your arm high till the shoulder splits
And fellow me, the empty ship,
The wind laden with bells.
Over the faces of mothers and refugees,
Over the decaying verses and metres
I will spurt feuntains of heney
I will write about trees or shoes, reses or beys.
Tell the winter to. depart,
Tell the pretty hunchbacked bey
That my fingers are leng as needles,
That my eyes slash like knives,
That this is the last day fer verses.
When Lebanon breaks, and the slew nights ef peetry clese
I shall put a bullet in my threat.
- by Muhammad al-Maghut
(Summer 1958)
182
The Postman's Fear
Prisoners everywhere,
Send me all you've seen
Of horror and weeping and boredom-
Fishermen on every shore,
Send me all you know
Of empty nets and whirling seas-
Peasants in every land,
Send me all you have
Of flowers and old rags,
Of torn breasts,
Pierced abdomens
And wrenched-out fingernails.
Send them to my address
In any cafe on any street in the world:
I am preparing a huge portfolio
On human suffering
To present to God
As soon as it is signed by the lips of the hungry
And the eyelids of the waiting.
But oh, you miserable ones everywhere,
I have a fear
That God may be illiterate.
(1970)
183
An Arab Traveller in Space
Scientists and technicians,

Give me a passport to space
I am an envoy from my tearful country
In the name of its widows, old men and children
Send me a free passport to space.
Instead of money in my hand
I have tears.
There is no place for me here.
Put me at the tail of the spaceship
On its roof
For I am a villager, and accustomed to that
I will not hurt a star
I will not abuse a cloud
All I want is to reach
The sky with utmost speed
To place a scourge in the hand of God
That he may whip us into revolution.
(1970)
184
Ice and Fire
Take a cigarette and describe the war to me
Take a loaf of bread and describe my feet to me
Tears streaming on my shoulder,
I will describe to you the caravans of wind and bullets
I am as innocent as the partridge
But I am thirsty-
I may collapse at any moment!
I smile,
Though my back is bent under the idol of my sorrows.
Drifts of dust,
Shake off my sad notebooks
And listen:
Bread sickens me like poison,
Water sickens me like the plague
Yet I am thirsty, and my spirit burns ...
Thirsty,
And my spirit grows crooked as the pine
Oh, my God:
rose of ice, rose of dust
There is a neglected hunger in our mouths,
Neglected breasts on our chests.
Prostitutes sicken me like tuberculosis,
Virgins sicken me like the plague
. .. /
(" Ice and Fire" )
185
yet I spend long hours

Under the rain, behind the chimneys
To watch a man approach his wife
Or a girl scratching her side before the mirror.
Sometimes I think of victory, and of defeat

Of great heroes
Hitching up their pants behind the fences,
Yawning in bathrooms.
What is the difference between a flower on the dinner

table
And a flower on the grave?
Between bread and tin foil?
A breast and a hammer?
Or between the man who dies at the head of an expedition
And the man who dies in mid-yawn
as he defecates amid the ruins?
My God:
the cherry branches grow tall
And send their plundered blood off on freight cars

And the goats' green eyes stream in the moonlight
A summer here and a winter there
And blood-stained birds
Huddle together over the corpses, with their red claws.
Should we love you, or should we go to sleep?
Or do we fix the mirrors over the haunts of the heroes?
- by Muhammad a1-Maghut
(1964)
186
The Orphan
Oh, the dream

My glittering carriage smashed
All of its wheels scattered like gypsies
To the world's end.
I dreamt of spring one night
And when I awoke
My pillow was heaped with flowers
I dreamt of the sea once
And in the morning
My bed was filled with fish fins and seashells
But when I dreamt of freedom
Freedom fell on my neck
Like the morning's halo
You will never find me again

In the port, or awaiting the trains .
You will find me up
In public libraries
Sleeping on the maps of Europe,
The sleep of the orphan on the sidewalk,
Where my mouth spans more than one river
And my tears flow from one continent to another.
(1970)
187
The Dead Man
You broken bridges in my heart-

Mud, clear as children's eyes-
We were three, crossing the city like cancer,
Sitting among the fields and coughing near the ships.
We had no country, no bells,
No farms, no whips.
We were looking for a crime or a woman under the

starlight;
Our feet squelched in the sand
Opening sewers of blood.
We, the fallen youth,
Broken spears outcast from a country ..
Who would give us a woman in red cotton clothes?
Who would give us a voiceless people to whip
lik
animals on the backside-
So we could hear the tearing of good shirts,

And hay whistling over the face of the sea?
So we could hear the echo
Of our six wounded feet resounding on the sidewalk
Where a hundred years stalk in our bloody mustaches ..
A hundred years, while the rain mutters between our feet.
We stood swordless
And motherless under the electric light
... /
("The Dead Man")
188
Yawning and crying,

Flicking our long cigarettes at the stars,
Talking of lust and sadness, and the steps of prisoners
sounding in Fayruz' throati*
And the staring clouds of this country
Surveyed us and moved along,
Scattered thighs over the mountains.
God!
You exhausted moon,
You travelling deity--like an old horse!
They say that you are everywhere:
On the threshold of the brothel, in the screams of horses,
Between the bright rivers
And under the leaves of sad willow trees.
Be with us in these broken eyes
And leper's fingers;
Give us a desirable woman in the moonlight
So we may weep,
And hear the roaming of fingernails, the moaning
of mountains-
*A famous contemporary Lebanese singer and actress,

Fayruz sings patriotic as well as popular songs, some
times dealing with the plight of political prisoners,
the exiled, and downtrodden.
. . ./
("The Dead Man")
189
Hear the guns clanging in a woman's breasts.
No other nation in history drags this ridiculous ass
Or has eyes filled with bells.
For twenty brown-skinned prostitutes we bring
nightgowns and cigarettes,

Peep out of doorways
And direct our tearful eyes toward the dinner tables
of the dead.
For twenty lighted rooms among the hills
We bend over our tanks
And hook our shining chins over the clouds.
Smile, dead man!
Smile, green-eyed crow!
Your beautiful country soon will be no more;
Your false glory is extinguished like hay-fire.
Open your lovely thighs and let us go
Hurrying to our graves and children.
Glory is a partridge in the mud
And bread is a naked little girl in the wind.
How my wounded heart betrays me,
That bed of tobacco and tears!
Under the drooping leaves of oak trees
I stood smoking in the dark
.. ./
( "The Dead Man")

190
Feeling my chest, and my throat where it bulged

like an apple;
Around my eyes, a flock of tears.
I was like a naked laugh in the middle of Asia
Crossing the sad streets of Beirut,
Exhaling like a snake under the autumn sky.
Wounded Beirut lay sighing on the asphalt
Fondling her small breasts ashamedly under the dark,
thick clouds.
I was crying on that wretched night
And my thighs were full of stars
As I pounded the asphalt with my feet
Pursued by the scent of cherry trees,
The smell of history falling
In front of the shops.
I was ready to commit a crime
To see all my folkS, to touch them with my hand
Or to remember one night
In the streets of dear Damascus.
I was scurrying and swaying like a hungry string

of blazing chandeliers
Making my lonely way toward the sea,
That coward blue child
To hold it with my two hands and dig my fingers
... /
( "The Dead Man")
191
Into its pulsing, golden sand.

While the moon shone like a prostitute's mouth
between the trees
Spreading its wild locks before me,
Rising and falling like a blonde warrior over the hills,
And the wind whipped the strands of my hair
Behind me, I bent in despair
And wept.
I, the winter's musical pipe,
The great rose of shame!

Sadness welled in my shirt collar like wine
And all alone I fell down in front of the shops.
Oh tears rarer than blood!
Oh pain ablaze in my feet!
Under my nails the dust-bells cry
And I wipe the tears from my poor, haggard face.
I was imagining the hot alleys of my country

And the spring nights broken in the streets
When in the bosom of the clear sky
Lebanon's dreams and its quick breath
Leapt like winter fires,
The sick yellow air crawled in the dark
And in my blood burst poems of despair
Crying like plaintive tobacco birds.
Amid
t he
damp ruins of walls
... /
192
("The Dead Man")
My memory scurried like a prostitute in the streets

Naked, alone
Performing impossibilities
Lamenting like a skinny crow in the middle of Asia,
Symbol of shame and sorrow.
By the sea, where the golden steam opened like a
bamboo rose
I sniffed the scent of the thirsty trees
Among the rocks, the smell of tyres
Discarded in the night.
And the birds which circle over the corpse of the sea
and cry
And the thick red feathers that fallon trees and tanks
Gathered and stormed like arrows into the city,
And the bright, cold asphalt stretched before the sea.
searched for something to hold
And lean my cheek against,

But found only the wind and the soughing of trees.
I was in need of a woman to devour-
Or even a rock to hold against my chest
While I sobbed for hours.
I was full of lust and in despair, shattered
and comfortless,
And the fog stood on its two beautiful canes
Crying and staring at me.
. ../
( "The Dead Man")
193
On the cold glass

Of a lighted window by the sea
I pressed my little nose and cried.
I remembered my folks and my village
And streets I had crossed in the desert.
Through the silk curtains
I saw a naked woman kindled with passion like a red ship
And a handsome man lying on the sofa
Playing with her bare feet.
The lines furrowing his small forehead
Made me think of the autumn sun
And the slow steps of slaves in the night.
Smoke rings of tobacco danced in the room,
Gathered between her tiny nipples.
My lust shook the sidewalks.
--Her white underwear,
Scattered on the sofa like garden clouds!
I cried and shivered like a hot golden whip
While over the two breasts swam the soft, deadly music
Risen like pine trees before the fireplace,
Dispersed by rueful laughter.
She was tired
And sleep delved between her breasts.
I wept, and turned to the empty streets
Singing
song for sadness and blue eyes in the desert .
. . ./
("The Dead Man")
My wounded heart--that betrayer!

Here I would lay my gun and my shoes.
Here I would burn what's left of ink and laughter.
Red Europe oozes blood on my bed;
It flaps in my guts like an icy eagle.
After this day we shall never see the streets
of our country.
The ships I love spew blood
And civilizations.
The ships I love snatch up their chains and flee
Like a whipped lioness in the moonlight.
Oh, my wounded, betraying heart!
We have no more than bread, and poems, and the night
But for you, wounded Asia-
Withered rose in my heart-
Bread alone is enough,
And the golden wandering wheat fills your breasts
with bullets and wine.
- Muhammad al-Maghut
(April 1959)
194
195
Unsi aI-Hajj
(1937-
Born in Beirut, Unsi aI-Hajj rose rapidly in the field

of literary journalism; his reputation as an avant-garde poet
and critic
has won him the literary and artistic direc
torate of the city's most widely" read newspaper, Al-Nahar.

He has worked closely with Adonis and Yusuf al-Khal in
establishing an outlet for modern Arabic poetry in Shier
[Poetry] magazine since the inception of the project in 1957.
Like Adonis, he has made an extensive study of the modern
French poets and translated much.of this literature into
Arabic~
He is especially attracted to the French literature
of the absurd, and has concentrated on translations of Breton,

Prevert and Artaud.
The surrealistic dimension of aI-Hajj's
poetry represents a radical break with tradition.

form
In poetic
he has strayed farther than any of his contemporaries
from the tenets of metrical free verse into the realm of the
prose-poem, which retains no trace of the patterned poetic feet
tafCilat
Al-Hajj's collections of prose poetry include Lan [Never]
(1960), al-Ra's al-Maqtu'
[The Severed Head] (1963), and
Madi al-Ayyam al-Atiya [The Past of the Coming Days] (1965) .
196
The Deep House
The house and the smoke hug in the absence of shade.

I stretch my body in the sun
And mix with its rays
There is no need to shout for help, or to plant
things here
There is no need for the runaway to sweat,
No need to keep knocking.
The deep house is empty and full,
And an immortal is sliding about on the meat:
We bury the meat unrevenged
The waves are weak, and the wind-
The waves never drown the sea, and the wind is hollow
We bury the meat and do not weep over it
We bury the meat with no knowledge of it
We bury the meat without splitting the deep house,
the deep spirit
The deep God.
We bury the meat and eat it
We eat the meat and spit it
We spit the meat and plant it
We plant the meat to suffocate it:
The house and the smoke hug each other.
The house
and God,
The house and the spirit
... /
( " The Deep House" )

197
The house and the Word, the house and the need
And the sun.
The meat takes the shade hostage and runs
- by Unsi aI-Hajj
(1960)
198
We Are Two Children
He carried his head and left

I carried my head and entered.
We are two children, the first is white, the other
is a beast.
He went on purifying the place to death.
I was carried stone like to his grave
I was carried like snow, like shoe leather
Freedom dried me up and revived him
We must reduce its price so that we may love it.
I do not know how to hunt!
How my heart freezes:
I am afraid
To tell the whole truth about my handicaps.
We are two children, the first is a world and the other-
All colours make a white page,
A page that pursues the road to silence,
Pursues silence to the first of us
Two strangers, not two enemies.
I see the enemy that he does not see.
- by Unsi aI-Hajj
(1961)
199
A Plan
You were calling among the pine trees-
The wind carried your voice to my heart.
r was hiding behind the pine trees listening
while you called,

Praying you wouldn't see me.
You were calling among the pine trees:
Come,
my love.
was hiding behind the pine trees
So that you wouldn't see me

As, if r came, you'd only run away.
- Unsi al-Hajj
(1960)
200
Muhammad al-Fayturi
(l930-
Of Sudanese and Egyptian descent, Muhammad al-Fayturi

was born in Alexandria, Egypt.
An avid reader of Arabic and
European literature from an early age, al-Fayturi was strongly

influenced by the Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi, the
Lebanese Abu Shabakah, and the Mahjar poets of Khalil Gibran's
circle.
His first volume of poetry, Aghani Afriqiya [Songs
of Africa] (1955) denounces colonialism and the exploitation

of blacks by whites.
These poems are rich in imagery, vital
and direct in their apprehension of human tragedy.
After a
period of silence while the young poet tested his political

and social ideals, al-Fayturi continued to pursue the theme of
black Africa in his next two collections, ~Ashig
Min Afrigiya
[A Lover from Africa] (1964) and Udhkurini Ya Afrigiya [Remem

ber Me, Africa] (1966) .
Al-Fayturi later came to call himself a revolutionary
Sufi with the publication of MaCzufat Darwish Mutajawwil
[Music of an Itinerant Dervish] (1970), claiming that his
life-long interest in mysticism originated with his black
father, who was a mystic.
Whereas his earlier work celebra
ted his African-Arab identity, in the latter volume al-Fayturi

linked his personal defeats_in life and in love to the Arab
defeat of 1967, viewing the whole as a drama unfolding between
man and God.
His collected poems were published in Beirut under the
title of Diwan Muhammad al-Fayturi (1972; 2 vols.).
201
He Died Tomorrow
He died
Not a drop of rain grieved for him,
not even a face or two frowned for him,
not one night did the moon appear over his grave.
Not a lazy worm stirred,
not a stone split.
He died tomorrow
a filthy corpse,
neglected shroud.
Like a dream
the people awoke-
like infected ages!
he passed by the fields of roses at dawn.
He died .
his soul darkened and burnt, full
of a history smeared with the blood from the

dangling nooses,
the screams of rebels in the barred prisons
and the suffering, cracked faces of old women
as they raise to the skies
in humble sorrow
their painful arms, like sickles of the field
and eyes in which the shadow of the noose swings
.. . /
(" He Died Tomorrow")
--My son!
202
Where have the soldiers taken
your loving face?

They denied me the smell of your garment, denied me
the scent of you.
My God, how beautiful my son is in the flush
of his youth,
as though walking among the emotions of all hearts!
My son! The jailor closed the door
of his great prison,
the guard dragged a chain
a whip fell, and curled around the night.
--And you, my father?
Won't you be back before winter?
All of us are crying still
and clamouring,
my mother, my brothers, and I
morning and evening!
Corne back
so we will not be called poor orphans!
How often have I run grieving, asked one and all:
II
My
father is innocent!
why have they bound him in chains?"

They were silent, eyes downcast
as though they were pr isoners
too~.~
. .. /

203
They knocked on the door one night and entered.

--What do you want?
What is it
youfre carrying?
But they threw his corpse by the wall.
The faces of dead memories stared at me,
my tears dried by the tears of the others.
Tomorrow the procession of hunger will pass on our filthy

street.
Let the years of drought vanish,
let the rain pour ..
let it flood the fields of wheat and rice,
let it flood the river
let it wipe the grief from the trees with its grey hand.
One day whatever the harvest yields will be mine,
the skies, the earth and the course of the stream
will be mine.
The famine of the soil will end,
and the famine of the people!
And one dark, damp day
long as a tunnel
he awoke, shaking his hands in his death throes,
hands like sickles of the field
extended in his eyes, black as the palm trees.
With an abortive rattle
.... /
204
he collapsed on the ground;
a noose
hung from the wall of the horizon
and the cold corpse fell in the mud.
- by Muhammad Miftah al-Fayturi

(l955)
205
Ahmad 'Abd al-Mu'ti Hijazi

(1935-
Ahmad (Abd al-Mu'ti Hijazi was born in a small village in

Egypt, where he finished his elementary education.
early 1950's he moved to Cairo
Teachers' College there.
In the
and spent seven years in the
He participated in the poetry fes
tival in Damascus in 1960, and read his famous poem, "Tammuz."

His first book of poetry, Madina bila Qalb [Heartless City] had
been published the previous year; subsequent books include
Lam Yabqa illa)l-lCtiraf [Only Confession Remains] (1965) and
Marthiyyat lil-'Umr al-Jamil [Elegy for the Beautiful Age]
(1973).
His collected poems, Diwan Ahmad 'Abd al-MuCti
Hijazi, were also published in 1973.

Suffering from a sense of displacement in the city,
Hijazi writes movingly about loneliness, bewilderment and
anxiety, feelings of loss and the fear of nothingness, in a
succinct style which avoids the pitfalls of abstract emotional
ism.
He wrote traditional verse at the outset of his career
but changed to free verse soon after his move to Cairo and
exposure to the modern
c~!~ents
of literary thought.
In a
lengthy introduction to his first volume o verse he

stated his literary aim: to produce "a document that bears
witness to our age and depicts our generation."
In his
later poetry his alignment as a committed Arab nationalist

is evident.
An ardent Nasserite, he wrote songs for the
Arab Social Union, in which organization he hoped to find

answers to the problems of urban life.
206
A Song of Waiting
I am here, waiting by the roadside, my love-

A smile on my lips coming and going.
In the clear night lovers walk hand in hand,

A word for a word, and an endless smile.
But my arm trembles only in the night of my loss,
And the night of my words! Will I grow old
before they are heard?
Come to me once more, for the love of heaven,
I will light my candles for you
And for you I will play my guitar.
And if you wish, my love, I shall house you in my ribs,
And if you weary of my friendship, let you go.
But I will be waiting.
I will leave when the moon comes
And return at dawn,
And in the spring I will be back carrying flowers.
In autumn I will disappear under the rain.
- by Ahmad 'Abd al-Mu~ti Hijazi

(July 1957)
207
We Have Nothing
The trees turned green,
The flowers reddened on the green walls.
A warm wind from the desert visited us
A girl bared her arm,
Eyes half-closed, gleaming
Eyelids trembling,
Downcast;
A dying man cried on the cross
As the tip of a branch appeared from a barred window;
The singer melted in a song
Constantly broadcast,
And perhaps the singer was asleep
When it was played.
And perhaps the singer was old.
But it spoke
of his waiting under the rain,
It said he will spend the rest of his days
Awaiting the moon;
The road was sunny between the trees
Where the children stooped for fallen flowers,
One bird on a far branch chirped,
A procession of men and women walked by the wall
. . ./
( " We Have Nothing" --con' t)
208
Squinting in the face of the sun.

A car appeared driving slowly,
Its radio still complaining of love-
But I
... I was complaining of hunger
With the coming of spring.
- by Ahmad (Abd al-Mu'ti Hijazi

(March 1958)
209
The Lonely Woman's Room
Here she is, casting the city off her shoulders
Closing the door behind her,
she draws the curtains
and turns on her light in the middle of the day
Those are her things-
animals she found,
waiting for her in the corners
and on the walls;
There is a gas stove,
a sink
and shelves to store groceries
A small alcove,
a bed in the alcove,
and a night table;
books to bring on drowsiness,
an ashtray
and small candles
Everything has a permanent place
and a presence
and a time to receive its bread and water
and in her swaying shadow it finds a blanket and rest
Everything about her has a desire and a cry-

Has the
feel
of a body familiar with loneliness
... /
210
(tl
The Lonely Woman's Room" )
and self-contemplation
All is mirrors
She has her face
and all the intimacy and reticence of her limbs
In her childhood she may have passed a place like this,
and such a light,
and the shadow of a basin falling on a clean bed.
Perhaps she has known-

in the presence of dangling necklaces and chandeliers-
a spirit that whisks her to faraway gardens,
dancing on streams
quivering under clear water
and smiling in the deep_
It was not me
she was talking to, but someone else
and looking at his careful face
- by Ahmad ~bd al-Mu~ti Hijazi

(Apr. 24, 1978)
211
Sa'di Yusuf
(1929?
One of the "committed" group of Iraqi poets who drew

inspiration from the pioneering work of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
and (Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, Sa~di Yusuf was forced to leave
Iraq for political reasons in 1964 and was. unable to return
until 1971.
He spent the intervening years travelling through
Europe, then living in Algeria.

Yusuf's poetry is characterized by lucidity and preci
sion of statement.
He succeeds in matching form to content,
probing his subject with arresting insight.
Surprisingand
enigmatic twists enliven his work, which might otherwise

border on bleakness--for the ambiguity of the human condi
tion in the modern age is its philosophical burden.
Yusuf's
book, Ba'idan 'ani s-sama)i l~4Jla [Far from the First Heaven]
(1970) delivers a typically harsh symbolic statement:
the
storms of this age have stranded man on a barren shore,

where he must take what refuge he may.
Eleven volumes of poetry preceded the publication of
Yusuffs
Diwan in 1979.
The first was entitled Al-Qursan
[The Pirate] (1952); others include 51 Qasida [51 Poems] (1959),

An-Najm war-ramad [Ashes and the Star] (1960), Al-Layali
Kullaha [All the Nights] (1976), and As-sa<atu
[The Last Hour] (1977).
l-~Akhira
212
Six Poems
I
To all the trees by the water
to deserted bars on still nights
to a friend I understand
to a girl who knows something other than sex
and something more than warm colours
I sent postcards that never arrived
II
Sometimes I ask:
Would it be merciful
to forget, or would it be a curse?
III
In Baghdad I see city squares that take me
to alleys
But I do not see alleys in Baghdad
that take me to the squares
IV
I know all of the slain
But tonight do any of them
know me?
The lady who sells pastries laughs.
The time set for her first
213
rendez-vous has passed,
and her second
has been proposed a minute ago ...
Has she noticed from your voice
that you missed your first rendez-vous too?
VI
In Somerset Maugham
I remember a blind captain
who kept sailing a cargo ship
across the eastern channels for years
- Sacdi Yusuf
(1972)
214
The Fence
His house was exposed to the dust of the streets

His garden, luscious with red carnations
Was open to dogs and strange insects,
Open to cats with claws;
The red carnations, opened for two days
Were a dinner table for dogs
And strange insects,
A dinner table for cats with claws ...
Dust from the streets stormed the dense leaves,
Salt on the flowers,
Salt on the hair,
Salt on the flower opening in his buttonhole
One day he remembered how his grandfather
Built the family house
- Sacdi Yusuf
(1976)
215
Khalid al-Khazraji
Khalid al-Khazraji is a young Iraqi poet who travels

between Baghdad and Beirut, and writes about both cities
with compassion and insight.
to heal and regenerate itself
He exhorts the war-torn city

in a manner akin to the
Tammuzi tradition of rebirth through travail; but interes

tingly, it is a feminine counterpart of the savior Tammuz
who figures in al-Khazraji's poetry as the sacrifice and
hope of the city.
The personification of city or country
as a fruitful woman is an ancient tradition in Arabic poetry;

her disappearance or barrenness is the corollary of a general
state of civil distress.
In his book of poems, Al-CAsafir Yaqtuluha al-Zama)
[The Birds are Dying of Thirst] (Beirut; 1979) symbolic inten
sity is matched by keen judgement in the balance and rhythmic
contours of Arabic free verse.
216
Beirut, My Love
I ask the orange gardens

And the migrating seagulls
About my love,
ask the olive forest-
Has my lover's shadow
Passed over your soil?
ask about a country
Whose forests are on fire,

Whose shores are on fire,
While the moon
Disappears every night,
And the trees wither.
ask about the delicate face
Which vanished in the avenues of darkness,
I ask about the young girl
Who dreams every hour
Of water and a loaf of bread.
Beirut, my love,
know that your face, which encircles the light,
Is pale
And blood washes the green windows ..
Oh, my love,
City of dreams and poems,
Death lurks in the gardens,
.. ./
(" Beirut, My Love II
217
In the houses,
In the seas;
Every drop of blood
Is a star,
And every pulse repeats
That surely your delicate face
Will one day return.
You know that I
Resist the winds,
The bullets
And the thieves.
Rebellion explodes in my heart
Like a flame,
And on the floor of the ocean
Rests whatever the ocean hides.
Beirut,
If the light awoke
Over your barred doors
The crucified would not return
To your besieged roads;

Will you listen to the metal ringing
in the soldiers' ditches,
Will you listen to the children in the cribs,
... /
(" Beirut, My Love" )
218
vlill you listen, my love, will you

Listen?
- by Khalid al-Khazraji (Nov. 1976)
219
The Birds Are Dying of Thirst
At the close of night lightning burns in the trees

And the wind hangs out its shirts
Village woman, you sway
The proud palm trees bow down for you
The snow falls, the grass of the gardens
Is drenched.
Rain, fall now
On the parched cities! the birds

Are dying of thirst, the pregnant women
are drinking with
Two-faced men.
Cities?
Does it rain in tired
The conquering soldiers fall asleep
High on the balconies; the children

Sell the evening tobacco.
The newspapers print
Official news of defeat.
o rain, fall now on the parched cities!

The birds are leaving their nests in the dawn.
The wind passes over our windows .. the cities
Of grass fall.
The evening turns to smoke,
To a field of bullets.
The women are barren now,
And at the close of night lightning
Burns in the trees; hunger spreads
Its blue coat over the wasted faces.
o rain, fall now on the parched
.../
(" The Birds Are Dying of Thirst")
Cities!
220
The women go on
Selling bread, awake half through

The night, and the roads are baptized
By the tears of tired men.
The city
Is dead, silence spreads over its districts

At the close of night
Lightning burns
In the trees
The wind hangs out its shirts
While the flames leap along the wood
The moon in the water falls on an isthmus ..
Light
Springs up in the dark, a violet dies
In the gardens
A bird swims
In a fine drizzle of perfume
The seasons change the shape of seasons, the country
which welcomes the sun
Throws off its shrouds
- by Khalid al-Khazraji
(Sept. 1977)
221
Bandar cAbd aI-Hamid
BandarcAbd aI-Hamid is a young Syrian poet whose style

is direct and easy, uncluttered by rhetorical devices and
ornate diction.
He departs from the regularities of meter
with equal assurance, shaping the poem to its quintessen

tial message with a streamlined effect.
'Ihtifalat
His book of poems,
[Celebrations] (1978) displays a realistic sensi
bility uncommon among young writers.
222
Suzanne
Suzanne and I in our journey every day
sometimes wonder
how this kiss,
which resembles an old wound, began.
We cannot understand at all.
Suzanne and I
meet frequently
Our fingers and clothes touch
Our papers mix
We talk about everything
We quarrel and end the argument in a word
We listen to music
and venture to discover childhood games
We laugh, or travel to a nearby tree
But we cannot understand
how this kiss,
which resembles an old wound, began
- by Bandar(Abd aI-Hamid
(1978)
223
The Child That Was
The child who used to play with us

striking us with pebbles
and crying at times
has grown up and travelled to another land
We remember her face clearly

and remember her hand stained with mud
and the white ribbon in her blond hair

memorized songs and little stories
and was ahead of us at the playground
She cursed us and repeated, when angry,
some words we did not much understand
Her crying was loud

when she was taken to another land
- by Bandar'Abd aI-Hamid (1978)
224
The Game
When the travelling planes pass

at great altitudes
over distant villages
the children halt their play
and raise their little hands over their eyes
to look at the beautiful travelling toy
And as soon as it disappears behind some

scattered clouds
they rush along in full force
after a torn ball
and repeat short songs
But no one knows

where their lyrics corne from
- by Bandar 'Abd aI-Hamid (1978)
225
Ghada al-Samman
(1942
Ghada al-Samman was born in al-Shamiyah, a small town
near Damascus. She was raised by her father--a university
professor, dean, and Syrian Minister of Education--owing to
the death of her mother while she was still a young child.
Dr. al-Samman encouraged his daughter to read widely in both
Arabic and French literature, but insisted that she study
science in university.
This she did, but immediately immersed
herself in a second degree program in English literature at

the University of Damascus upon completing her first degree,
and later obtained a Master's degree in the same subject
from the American University of Beirut.
After teaching school
for awhile the young writer embarked on a journalistic career.

A fine writer of short stories, a novelist, essayist, and
poet, Ghada al-Samman is outspoken on the issue of women's
rights in the Middle East, despite the stifling censure such
unconventional and "improper" views have incurred upon her work.
Since 1967 her fiction has increasingly stressed themes of
social and political significance, dealing with the repercus
sions of war and the mentality of defeat, the. painful reali
ties of life in Beirut, her adopted home, and the meaning of
love and death to individuals in the midst of this turmoil.
The theme of love is foremost in her poetry, which consists
of short meditative passages akin to prose sooner than to
metrical free verse.
Her poetic writings were collected in
I'tiqal Lahzah Haribah [Imprisonment of a Moment in Flight]

(1979) .
226
Imprisonment of a Question Mark
o stranger,
where do the songs go
after we hear them?
Where are the words of love
after we live them?
Where is the flame of the candle
after the candle melts?
Where
are the caresses
after your hand lifts?
Where does the lightning go
after it is extinguished?
and the storms of the forest when they abate?
and the meteors when they burn out?
Tell me where:
I shall await you there, my love.
- By Ghada al-Samman
(July 21, 1976)
227
Imprisonment of a Rainbow
I love you,
but I dread imprisonment
as the river hates
at any pOint
to be imprisoned in its course.
Be a waterfall, or a lake;
Be a cloud, or a dam;
My waters will slip over the rocks of your waterfall,
and follow their course.
They will gather in your lake,
and rush on.
You might
a~rest
me for a time,
but I should overflow your damj
I could be soaked into your cloud and imprisoned,
but I should pour down as rain and be free again
in the same streams.
I love you,
but you will imprison me
only as a waterfall imprisons a river-
only as a lake does,
or a cloud, or a dam.
Love me as I am,
a fleeting moment.
. .. /
(" Imprisonment of a Rainbow" )
Take me as I am, and be a sea
so wide and deep, that I may pour myself in you.
Am
I like mercury, wavering, uncontainable?
Then there was mercury before there was a sea.
It was the passionate spark
in the eye of a woman
whose lover had chemically attempted
to
capture her glance--freeze it into
solid matter.
There was mercury!
Don't you see, my love, that raisins
are a futile attempt to imprison the falling grape?
Love me as I am;
Don't try to capture my glance, or my spirit.
Take me as I am,
as the sea takes all the rivers that run to it
again and again, and know
despite waterfalls and dams and lakes
how to find their way to its endless assent.
- by Ghada al-Sarnman
(Jan. 1, 1975)
228
229
Amal Dunqul
(19ifO-1983) .
The Egyptian poet, Amal Dunqul, has written ostensibly
traditional poetry with romantic themes and a strong degree
of metrical regularity.
However, his experiments in
breaking or suspending the meter, his effectively simplified

diction, interesting dramatic techniques and undercurrents
of ironic realism support the contention that he is funda
mentally a modern poet.
Dunqul's volumes of poetry include
Maqtal al-Qamar [The Murder of the Moon] (1974), Al-Ahd al

Ati [The Coming Sunday] (1975) and Awraq al-Ghurfah "8" [The
Papers of Room No.8] (1983)
230
The Murder of the Moon
And by post of the sun they spread the painful news

Allover the city:
" The moon has been killed!"
They saw him crucified, his head dangling from the trees!
Thieves stripped the costly diamond breastpin
From his chest,
And left him in the branches
Like the black legend in the eyes of a blind man.
My neighbour said:
" He was a saint, why did they kill him?"
And the girl next door said:
" He liked my singing in the evening,
And gave me bottles of perfume.
For what crime have they killed him?
Have they seen him by my window at dawn
Listening to my song?"
While tears streamed from every eye.
Like orphans, like the moon's own children
They offered their condolences, and walked away.
The moon had died, like anyone else!
I sat down
To ask him about the hands which betrayed him
--But he-didn't hear me,
He was dead!
... /
231
( II
The Murder of the Moon")
I covered him with his robes,
I closed his eyelids
So that he wouldn't see who deserted him
And I walked through the gates of the city
To the countryside.
People of my village, your father is dead!
They killed him in the city--shed the tears
Of Joseph's brothers over him, then fled
And left him on the asphalt
In the blood and fury of their streets.
My brothers:
Your father is dead!
--What? Our father cannot be dead!
Yesterday, he was up all night
Telling us his sad tale!
--My brothers:
With my two hands I held him;
I closed his eyelids for you to bury him!
They said:
Enough;
You must be raving.
I said: I am only telling the truth!
Wait, they said, an hour or two
And he will appear.
Evening fell
And the moon came out
With dapper smiles and diamond beams
(" The Murder of the Moon")
--My brothers:
232
Here is your father,
In the flesh!
Who is it that lies on the floor of the city?
A stranger, they said,
Whom people took for the moon
And killed and wept over,
And repeated:
II
The moon is dead."
Our father couldn't possibly die.

No; never!
- by Amal Dunqul
(1974)
II.
Tammuz Rediscovered
(a) The Five Major "Tammuzi" Poets
234
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
(1926-1964)
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was one of the first exponents
of free verse in modern Arabic poetry--and unquestionably
the most influential, providing a coherent model for the
metrical, thematic, and mythological innovations which
had begun to revolutionize Arabic poetry by the mid-fifties.
Born in Jaykur, Iraq, Sayyab was educated in Arabic and
later English literature, first in Basra and then at the
Teacher's Training College in Baghdad.
He taught school
for a time before entering the civil service and becoming

active in the field of journalism.
Profoundly disturbed
by social ills in the Arab world, Sayyab was attracted

to communism at the outset of his career, then became an
Arab nationalist. His later poetry, written under the shadow
of an advanced neurological disorder
and
gradual paralysis,
reveals the crystallization of his views into a progressive

humanism.
Sayyab's early poetry was in the romantic tradition,
gaining in symbolic density-with the 5lPpearance of Asatir
[Myths] in 1950.
Over the next few years, as he experimented
with the complex art of adapting the taf'ilah [poetic foot]

to the nuances of tone and meaning in the free verse poem,
a gradual shift towards realism may be observed in his sub
ject matter.
AI-Munis al-'umya)
[The Blind Prostitute], a
long poem published in 1954, signifies a turning point in
235
this respect.
Around this time Sayyab's interest in
European literature extended from an admiration of Shelley

and Keats to an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell,
Louis Aragon and other major figures in modern English and
French poetry.
Eliot's concept of modern civilization as a
spiritual wasteland inspired Sayyab's application of an

analogous mythological symbolism to the state of the Arab
world.
Unshudat al-Matar [The Song of the Rain] (1960) is
a collection of poems pUblished previously in literary maga

zines which depicts a barren land awaiting the return of
the god Tammuz, the agent of long overdue and sweeping social
change, whose sacrificial death restores the natural order
and causes the life-giving rains to fall.
The concept met
with instant acclaim among Arab poets and critics, and was
the genesis of what has been termed the Tammuzi movement in
Arabic poetry of the following decades.
Sayyab's subsequent volumes of poetry include Al
Macbad al-Ghariq [The Drowned Temple] (l962), Shanashil Ibnat
al-Chalabi [The Balcony of the Chalabi's Daughter] (1964),
and Iqbal [the name of Sayyab's wife] (1965).
His Diwan
was published posthumously in two volumes, the first in 1971

and the second in 1974.
236
River of Death
Buwayb ...
Buwayb ...
The bells of a tower, lost on the floor of the sea
The water in the jars, the dusk in the trees
And the jars sweat bells like rain
The crystals melt, murmuring
"Buwayb
Buwayb!"
Longing burns in my blood

For you, 0 Buwayb
my
sad river, sad like the rain.
Would I could run in the dark

Clench my fists, and on each finger
Carry a whole year's longing, an oblation
For you, of wheat and of flowers.
Would I could look on from the hilltops
Glance at the moon that
Wades between your banks, casts shade
And fills the baskets
With water and fish and flowers.
Would I could wade in you, follow the moon
And listen to the pebbles flutter in the deep
As thousands of birds flutter in the trees.
. .. /
(" River of Death")

237
Are you a forest of tears, or a river?

And do the restless fish fall asleep at dawn?
And these stars, are they still waiting
To thread with silk the thousands of needles?
And you,
0 Buwayh .
Would I could sink in you, catch the shellfish

Would I could build a house of them
Or illumine the green trees and the water
With whatever the stars and the moon dispense:
I would travel with your ebb to the sea!
For Death is a strange world
It charms the innocent
You keep its hidden door, oh Buwibe ..
II
Buwayb
Buwayb,
Twenty years have passed, every year an age.

And today, when darkness descends
And I lie sleepless in my bed
Sharpening my consciousness, like a great tree at dawn
Denuded of branches and birds and fruit-
My blood and my tears swell like the rain
And sprinkle the sad world;
The sound of bells shivers in my veins for the dead
My blood yearns
... /
(" River of Death")
238
For a bullet of ice to pierce death

Deep in my chest, a hell which burns bones.
Would I could run to the side of the struggling
Clench my fists and strike at fate
Would I could drown in
my blood to the depths
Carry the burden of the people,

And send life forth -- my death, victory!
- by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
(1956)
239
Christ After Crucifixion
After they took me down I heard the winds

In a long wail skim the palm trees
And the steps fade.
The wounds
And the cross they nailed me to for the whole afternoon
Did not kill me, though.
And I listened: the wailing
Travelled across the field to me from the city

Like the rope that pulls on the ship
While it sinks to the depths.
The lamentation was
Like a string of light between the morning

And the darkness in the bleak winter sky.
And then the city drowsed upon its affairs.
When mulberry and orange trees bloom,

When the village of Jaykur extends to the limits
of the imagination
When it flourishes with grass, its fragrance sings
And the suns suckle it with their light
When even the darkness of the night turns green
The warmth touches my heart, and my blood runs in its soil
My heart is a sun when the sun throbs light
My heart is the earth, brings forth wheat and flowers
and pure water,
My heart is the water, my heart is a stalk of wheat
.. ./
(" Christ After Crucifixion")
Its death is resurrection:
240
it lives in him who eats of it.
In the dough which is shaped into loaves

And swells like a small breast, like the breast of life
I died by fire:
I burnt my clay, but the god

was untouched.
I was a beginning:
and in the beginning

were the poor.
I died that the bread might be eaten in my name,

that they might plant me in season.
How many lives will I live?
In every pit
I have grown into a future, a seed,

A generation.
l1y blood is in every heart
A drop, a droplet.
When I returned and Judas saw me-
His secret--he turned yellow.
I darkened him like a shadow, or the likeness of
some dispirited idea

I had fixed within him,
That he feared would find death out in the moisture
of his eyes .
(His eyes are of rook;
With them he oovers his grave from the peopZe)
Afraid of its warmth, afraid of lacking it, he had told all.

" --You! or has my shadow blanched, been scattered
with light?
... /
(" Christ After Crucifixion II
241
You proceed from the world of death, but death comes once!
So said our fathers, so they taught
USj
can it be false?"
This he thought when he saw me, and this his glance said.
A running step, steps.

The grave is sure to collapse with these steps.
Have they come?
Who but they?
A step--another.
The rocks cascade on my chest.
Didn't they crucify me yesterday?
Who knows that I am?
Here I am in my grave.
Who knows?
And Judas' friends, who will believe what they claim?
A step . A step.
Here I am now naked in my dark grave.
Yesterday I was furled like doubt, like a bud;
The flowers of blood drip under my snowy shrouds.
I was like the shadow between night and day
Until I exploded my very being in a shower of treasures,

stripped it like fruit.
When I cut my pocket into swaddling clothes,
and my sleeve
into a blanket
When I warmed the bones of the children one day
with my flesh
When I undressed my own wound to bandage the wounds
of others,
The wall fell between God and myself.
. . ./
(" Christ After Crucifixion If
242
The soldiers surprised even my wounds and the throbs

of my heart
Surprised something that was not death,
though in a cemetery
They surprised me as a fruitful palm tree is surprised
By a flock of hungry birds in a deserted village
The eyes of guns block my path

Levelled, they plot with their fire my crucifixion
Iron and fire:
but the light of the skies,
Remembrance and love are the eyes of my people.

They carry the burden for me, lighten my cross, so that
how small
Is that death--my death--and how big!
After they nailed me, and I turned my eyes to the city
I could not recognize field, or wall, or cemetery.
Something extended as far as the eye could see
Like a flourishing forest:
There was in every domain a cross, and a sad mother.
Blessed be the Lord
At the childbirth of the city!

(Summer 1957)
243
Song of the Rain
Your eyes, two palm forests at the hour of dawn

Or two balconies, the moonlight leaving
When they smile, your eyes, the vineyards sprout leaves
And the lights dance like moons in a river
Shaken weakly by the oar at the hour of dawn
As the stars pulse in their deep .
And they sink in a fog of translucent grief
As the evening spreads its arms over the sea
The warmth of winter and the shiver of autumn in it
And death, and birth, and darkness, and the light.
The shiver of weeping awakes my full soul
And a wild elation embraces the skies
Like the elation of a child afraid of the moon.
The rainbows seem to drink the clouds
Drop by drop, melt in the rain,
And the children repeat in the trees of the vineyards
And the silence of birds on the trees is brushed by
The song of the rain .
Rain
Rain
Rain
The evening yawns and the clouds still
Pour what they pour of their heavy tears
Like a child raving before he sleeps
Because a year before
. . ./
(" Song of the Rain fI
244
He awoke and could not find his mother.

The day after tomorrow she will return,
They answered his pleas.
She must return!
His friends whispered,
She is there.
On the hillside she sleeps the sleep of the grave,

Eating earth, drinking rain
Like a sad fisherman who gathers the nets
And curses the waters and fate
And scatters his songs where the moon sets.
Rain
Rain
Do you know what grief the rain sends?
And how the gargoyles whimper when it falls?
And how lost the lonely feel in it?
With no end--like spilled blood, like the hungry
Like love, like children, like the dead--the rain is!
And your eyes within me float with the rain
And across the waves of the bay lightning
Sets aflame the shores of Iraq
With shellfish and stars.
And the night spreads over them a blanket of blood.
I cry to the bay:
II
bay,
giver of pearls, shellfish and death!
II
The echo sobs:

II
bay,
... /
(H
Song of the Rain" )

245
giver
of shellfish and death!"
I can hear Iraq swell with thunder

And store the lightning in the fields and mountains
And if men break its seal
The winds will not leave a trace
Of the Thamoud tribe in the valley.
I can hear the palm trees drink the rain
And hear the villages moan, and the emigrants
Wrestle the thunderstorms of the bay
With oars and sails, singing:
" Rain
Rain
Rain,
And in Iraq there is hunger-
The crops spread there at harvest time
To gorge crows and grasshoppers
And the granaries are empty, and the stone
Mills turning in the fields . surrounded by people
Rain .
Rain .
Rain ..
How we shed tears the night of departure
And, fearing to be accused, made believe it was rain!
Rain .
Rain
Ever since we were young, the skies
"
.. /
(" Song of the Rain" )
246
Would cloud in the winter

And the rain would fall
And every year, whenever grass appeared on the earth,
we would hunger.
No year passed without hunger in Iraq.
Rain
Rain
Rain
In every drop of the rain
Red or yellow, from the shelter of the flowers
And every tear from the hungry and the naked
In every drop spilled of the slaves' blood
Is a smile awaiting a new mouth
Or a nipple reddened on the mouth of the newborn
In the world of the youthful tomorrow, Giver of Life!
Rain
Rain .
Rain
Iraq will fill with grass in the rain."
I cry to the bay: "0 bay,
o giver of pearls, shellfish and death!
II
And the echo sobs:

"0 bay I
o giver of shellfish and death!"

And from its abundant gifts the bay scatters
Over the sands the pungent foam and shellfish
... /
(" Song of the Rain" )

247
And whatever remains of the bones of the wretched
Drowned emigrant
who still drinks death
From the high waves of the bay and from the deep.
And in Iraq a thousand snakes drink the nectar
From a flower Euphrates nurtures with dew.
And I hear the echo
Ring in the bay,
" Rain .
Rain .
Rain .
In every drop of the rain
Red or yellow, from the shelter of flowers
And every tear from the hungry and the naked
And every drop spilled of the slaves' blood
Is a smile awaiting a new mouth
Or a nipple reddened on the mouth of the newborn
In the world of the youthful tomorrow, Giver of Life.
II
And the rain falls.
(1956)
248
[From]
The Book of Job

[Part I of X]
Thanks be to You, though the disease has been prolonged

And despite the tyranny of pain,
Thanks be to You! whatever You send is a gift
And catastrophes reveal Your benevolence.
Havenft you given me this darkness-Havenft you given me this dawn?
And does the earth complain of the raindrops?
Is it angered at the withholding of the clouds?
Long months and these wounds
Tear my sides like knives;
The pain does not lift at daybreak,
And the night does not wipe pain away with death.
But if Job screams, his cry is:
"Thanks be to You; whatever You send is just
And these wounds are a lover's gifts
I hold as a bouquet to my chest.
Your gifts abide in my heart,
Your gifts are accepted.
I leave my wounds open,
Give them to me!"
~I]c:i
call on passersby:
"Look and envy me, these are my lover's gifts 1 "
And if fire singes my forehead
I think it your forgotten kiss of flame.
Beautiful the insomnia, I follow Your sky
With my eyes till the stars set,
... /
(" The Book of Job If
until Your kindness touches the window of my house.

Beautiful is the night:
the cries of owls,
The honking of a car from afar

The moaning of the sick, and a mother repeating
To her child the legends of her ancestors
Forests of the sleepless night, the clouds
Veil the face of the sky
And polish it under the moon.
And if Job screams, his cry is
II
Thanks be to You, 0 Destiny-thrower

Repriever, who signs the cure!"

(Dec. 26, 196 2 )
249
250
Yusuf al-Khal
(1917-
Yusuf al-Khal was born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and is

a graduate of the American University of Beirut, where he
studied philosophy and literature.
In 1948 he left Lebanon
for New York, where he worked with the United Nations Secreta
riat and in his own export business, and edited a newspaper
called al-Huda.
Later he continued work with the United
Nations in Libya, then returned to Beirut and worked

in the field of journalism for a time.
As a research assis
tant at the American University of Beirut he gathered around

him a number of young poets and critics to establish one
of the most significant periodicals of modern Arabic poetry,
Shier.
At the time of its conception in 1957 Adonis joined
the magazine and collaborated closely with al-Khal in creating

a prestigious outlet for experimental and avant-garde poetry.
The magazine's publication continued until 1964 and was
revived for three more years in 1967.
Al-Khal also ran a
publishing firm and brought out numerous volumes of poetry

by experimental poets before the concern folded due to a
lack of funds.
He owned a modern art gallery which became
a centre for weekly gatherings of poets in Beirut.

Al-Khal's first poetic publications were Al-Hurriya
[Freedom] (1944) and a poetic play, Hirudiya [Herodias] (1954),
consisting of some seven thousand lines in the al-khafif
meter with varied rhyme schemes.
His subsequent volumes of
251
poetry ventured more boldly into experimental forms and

realistic subject matter, taking a highly critical view
of Arab politics and retrospective thought.
He published
A1-Bi'r a1-Mahjura [The Forsaken Well] in 1958, Qasa'id

fi 1-Arba'in [Poems at Fort~J in 1960, Tha1ath Masrahiyyat
[Three Plays] in 1959, and a number of translations of
modern American
Sandburg.
poets
including Robert Frost and Carl
In recent years he has devoted himself to his
editorial work at Dar a1-Mahar, a well known publishing

house in Beirut.
252
The Eternal Dialogue
When will our sins be erased?

When will the pain of the weary bloom?
When will the fingers of doubt touch us?
Are we dead by the roadside, with no knowledge of death?
Shrouds of sand conceal us from the sight of others,
And dust scattered by hoofs in the sun's arena
You say:
Look at me, I am still a child.
There are traces of the flood on my wet shirt,
Virginal secrets asleep in my eyes
Desires still shedding first tears
And wounds that cover my young body.
Are you thirsty?
Seize the rock and strike it.
Are you in darkness?
Roll it from the grave.
When hunger bites, there are the manna and the
quails~
If you are naked, make a garment of fig leaves
So others will not know of your sin.
In the great temptation, be as patient as Job, and do not fear
The strength of evil:
God's cross is raised on the hill of time.
On the shore is a lighthouse:
when it is lit
We strike the forehead of dawn with our hands, and bring forth
Water from the rock, which sweeps the sand
To the sea.
In the horizon, a bird's wing
(rrThe Eternal Dialogue")
253
Settles on the skull of night,
And a glowing star tells the story
Of the manger to passers to and fro.
In secret a God 1,,,ho f ills the eye,
A God who is not yet dead, a God who pours

Love on the wound, is exposed.
II
In my path,
Crocodiles and phantom crocodiles
My house is crowded with owls and crows
Black clouds augur flood and death
And at the roadside bones are drying
In shame, in lone1iness--in time.
Is this naked crawling thing a man?
A man in the image of God?
I see him ripped from the flesh of Satan,
Slaying the dragon in the forest, spilling
Its blood on the ground to quench
The conqueror's thirst
For unbegun worlds.
I see how he carries the earth between his hands
Hurls it in a maze, and builds a hut
Of steel to hide from death, to hide
From the secret.
I see him emptying the sea
Into his eyes and hiding his head in the sand,

Afraid of his enemies:
would the blind man

I
("The Eternal Dialogue rt )
254
See his enemies

As veins no longer pulsing with love or hate,
As a tongue that speaks only the unspeakable,
As minus wandering the road where no road is?
III
We are slaves to the past, slaves

To the future--slaves suckling shame
From the cradle to the grave.
Our sins!
The hand of time has not crafted our sins,

They are the work of our hands.
Perhaps the sun does not rise to revive us.
Here is the cemetery of light, here is the sand,
Here the songster becomes a vulture
And the first grain of \vheat perishes,
Here doubt is abolished
And speech dies on righteous tongues.
God's cross does not erase our sinsi
Will they be lifted if our wings
Race the wind, if the seal of secrecy
Breaks and the world spurns us?
My future is the first path and rendez-vous with illusion,
As were my ancestors' paths in the beginning:
The crow of death has no mercy for our fallen;
None has risen from the grave but God,
Or something we call God--whose flesh we ate,
. . ./
(nThe Eternal Dialogue")
255
As bread, whose blood we drank as wine
Whose bread did not fill us, whose wine did not intoxicate us.
What use is the light that hides under a bushel?
IV
Will death reach us, perplexed as we are?
Whatever has happened, whatever was
We have accepted but not understood.
Blasphemers!
Faith will not save us
As it saved Isaac,
Nor will love intervene:
God's cross still stands
On the hill of time.
It erases our sins,
The pain of the weary blooms in it
And in it the fingers of doubt touch us,
The chapter of death on earth folds.
- by Yusuf al-Khal (1957)
256
The Long Poem
I do not see a gentleman in the crowd.
The pelicans fan out
on the lake, and there is not one eagle on the horizon.
The water is motionless along the banks nearby.
The air is heavy, the light is heavy.

speaks, by no miracle.
The donkey
The blind man sees, by no miracle.
The dead man rises, by no miracle.
Miracles are digits
in a machine,
And the sky is unpredictable as ever.
I am silent when I speak.
The woman by my side is a mere dress.
I will drink a cup, though the cup is empty.
I will smile
though my mouth
has no lips.
I will harvest a field planted in darkness.
I am the night, awaited by thieves.
II
I will plant a bottle on the sidewalk and imagine it a woman.
Warmth, give me warmth!
My flesh is cold as sin.
For a thousand years I've been chewing the leaves of the Yemen
tree; for a thousand years I've

been riding a dead horse.
For a thousand years
I've gone
without a face.
My mask is a tombstone,
... /
(If
The Long Poem It
and today I travel without a passport.
257
My money is counterfeit,
my head is hairless,
and I am acclaimed by the whistle of the wind in the reeds.
III
On the shores of Lebanon I stand screaming:
How long must I
keep on dying
and not die?
If
How long must I await him who left me, saying:
will return"?
How long must I receive the tide, and

at its ebbing sit
in tears on the shore?

I want to die:
let the winds sow me!
I want my lover to return:
let the waves have mercy on me.
In the wilderness the grass prays without incense.

cross in that temple, no picture on the wall.
There is no
The doors are open
but no one enters.

Come back to me!
The wolf eats, while I hunger.
sit.
The wall walks, while I
The stones are a mass of lust and fire, and I
am a chunk of ice in a cup of spirits.

The child of joy laughs in the grass,
The man of joy sails downstream with the wind:
Joy, will you wave at me too?
Time sits still as a cripple
in the autumn sun.
Being mortal, what do I fear?
Being
immortal, how
shall I conform?
... /
("The Long Poem")

258
Who will give me my death, so I may live?
My horse's forehead is a grip for the wind.
His hooves run
like rivers in
a dream.
His body shines like a light on the edge of the city.
IV
I will blindfold myself and walk as a cripple on the earth.
The man next door
is a wall of smoke.
The woman next door has an iron grip
and the stranger among us is as lean as a reed.
At dawn I will not curse my commandments.
I will not finish
my journey to the kingdom of death.
In the stagnant water of the lake I satirize my face like
al-Hutay'a~
and in the crowd I unmask myself like fiery al-Hajjaj.**
I am an enigma.
I fall like a star, and my wings are a bird
ascending.
Spit in my face, oh Teacher!
Your bed is a toothless mouth.
*The poet Jarwal ibn-'Aws (d. 678 A.D.) was given his nickname,
al-Hutay)a, for his short and ungainly figure. Suffering also from
a doubtful parentage, he became particularly adept at satiric forms
of poetry, though brilliant in all other forms as well. He did
not hesitate to satirize himself, his mother and father, or his
guests and his guests were quick to retaliate in verse.
**Al-Hajjaj ibn-Yusuf al-Thaqafi (b. 661 A.D.) was appointed Governor
of Arabia for his military exploits (692 A.D.) and was the heavy
handed viceroy of the Umayyads. Dispatched to quell the dissatis
fied factions in Iraq, as Philip K. Hitti reports, "The unexpected
arrival of al-Hajjaj at the famous mosque of aI-Kufah, in disguise
and accompanied only by twelve cameleers, his brusque mounting of
the pulpit and removal of the heavy turban which veiled his face,
and his fiery oration, are among the most dramatic and popular epi
sodes recounted in Arabic literature." (History of the Arabs, p.207)
(" The Long Poem")
259
Who is it that sits in the sand, and dwells

in the margins of books?
Who is he, that blind driver?
The white man is burning.
The black man has changed into

a breast.
The tree
under whose shade I grew up has withered.

The record turns
and no one listens.
Life is to be found under canopies,
and a woman's thigh is worth two coins.

Every day mountains move, and there is no faith anywhere.
The old is a burden on the new, and the new is an undeveloped
breast.
VI
My eyes are on the horizon; I bow my head in the dark.
The one I loved is travelling, and he has not returned.
Since the coming of spring
I have waited and wept.
The sky is cloudy, there is no boat on the horizon,
the tide is empty even of sand.
The ebb leaves nothing, and the nets are a palm
clenched against the wind.
In my mouth there is hemlock and honeycomb.
Listen:
my mother is barren, and my father is a priest
in the temple.
I am a miracle-performing madman.
("The Long Poem")

260
My god speaks of me, my flesh
speaks of me.
My wounds are still fresh.
The moneychangers mill in the corners of the temple.
And my wife-
Even my wife has left me.
VII
My neck is wooden, and my head is a wad of hay
on a newspaper dummy.
Strike!
I am a Babylonian.
My gardens are hung amid the

noise of the street.
Between me and the sky is a split moment.
My dogs bark
in the yard, and there are no bones in the graves.

Blackflies feed on eyeballs in the City of God.
Strike!
Do not hesitate.
In the upper room you kissed me

twice,
Silver in your pockets.
This time the grave is deep, and I

shall not rise.
My people aspire
to the sky; how can they come down to the valleys?
The smell of their skin is rank, and none of them walks in
the light.
Strike!
I will not sit on a stone.
My neck has no
roots, and my body is a discarded stick.
("The Long Poem")
261
VIII
Don't dance on my grave--I am not dead yet!
I have been watching since dawn, and there is no gentleman
in the crowd.
The rats are an army in the King's state.
For weapons they
have legs
sunk in a bed of mire.
Whose hazel eyes are these?
Whose laziness rolls in these hips?
Whose are these shaking bellies, reeling like a reed in the wind?
"I am the calm forest,"
If
I am the crossroad,
If
says the coward.

says the cripple.
My words are like dry coal, like black hearses

And the knowledge I stole for my people will fall with me
to the pit.
IX
This falling fruit will be crushed.
This wasted land will be destroyed.
Before the blind we count on our fingers, and before the sultan
we are silent as mats.
The eagles build nests in the sand, and the saints
pray in the mud.
The unemployed must take their hats off.
An idol sits on the crossroad, spreading his ulcerous wounds

in the sun.
He stretches his trunk in our midst, and flicks
his murderous tongue; he carries the smell of his secred hatred,

and throws it
(" The Long Poem")
262
on the yellow winds.

In every house he sits, and there are no ashes on the hearths.
The trinity which frightened you is one, now.
The bread of the trinity is stone,
the wine of the trinity is a medicine for scabies.
The widow's coin is counterfeit, and death is an empty hand.
To the Servant of God* I recite my story.
To the men and women who are his slaves
I offer this anthem:
The last days are at hand--the hours at our fingertips.
Defeat is a raised flag;
The pain of birth, burning oceans.
God, give us a sign.
- by Yusuf al-Khal
(1960)
*"'Abdna>il": a proper name literally meaning the slave or

servant of God.
263
Khalil Hawi
(1925-1982)
Khalil Hawi was born in Shuwayr, Lebanon.
He studied
philosophy and Arabic literature at the American University

of Beirut, where he returned in the capacity of Professor
of Arabic Literature after receiving a doctorate in that
subject from Cambridge University in England.
He has written
a number of critical studies of Arabic, English and French

poetry, including Khalil Gibran:
His Background, Character,
and Works (1963) in English, and is the editor of the Ency

clopedia of Arabic Poetry.
The influence of the spiritual
tradition in modern and medieval Arabic poetry is mingled

in his work with such Western influences as the poetry of
Shelley, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the philosophy of
Sartre and Nietzsche. His vision of the world is a gloomy one,
yet ultimately far from pessimistic: Hawi believes in the
possiblity of profound social change once the Arab world has
thrown off the shackles of the past and channelled its spiri
tual resources into the construction of its future.
Hawi's first volume of poetry (1940)-was in the-Lebanese
dialect; he then turned to Modern Standard Arabic and met with
greater success in subsequent publications.
In his metrical
free verse, philosophical depth is conveyed by simple dic

tion, and finds its expression in symbols inspired by popular
legends (the truth-seeking Sinbad,
for instance, torn bet
ween the values of the East and the West) and in rhythms
264
adapted from folk songs.

His collections of poetry include Nahr al-Ramad [River
of Ashes] (1957), AI-Nay wa l-Rih [The Flute and the Wind]
(1961), Bayadir
al-Ju~
[The Threshing-floors of Hunger] (1965),
and Al-Racd al-Jarih [The Wounded Thunder] (1979).

On June 6, 1982, two days after the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon, Hawi committed suicide.
265
The Cave
I have known how the minutes stretch their legs

How they freeze, and change into ages
I have come to a cave on the seashore
My forehead is branded
A night has hardened on the rocks
I have left the seahorses to chew
My entrails
And scatter them in space
I have seen the horror of boats breaking
While the echo fell
Vainly through a labyrinth of echoes
Casting over my eyes a spell of darkness:
In the wind it howls, begs, and falls at last.
The sea dashes and retreats
Dead fish
Settle in my blood
Rotten fruit, and peelings
My hand clenches and melts in the sand
The sand's winds eat into it
And whistle in my veins
An old knife
Cuts into my flesh, and I bleed.
--Would I have the nerve to revolt?
. . ./
("The Cave")
266
My God, how the minutes stretch their legs

How they freeze, and change into ages!
Oh, You descended and came to me,
Unexpected visitor
You heaped my table
With the fragrant manna and quails
You poured the wine
From a new kind of jar
You gave me reign over the genii of the caves and the seas;
Whatever my heart would have appears in my hand!
In the clay dwells doubt, and loss of reason.
Houris, rubies, buildings
With a magician's tap:
11
Be!
11
and it is.
The fire blooms, fills my fireplace

Yields fruit, and spring
Crawls in to furnish my room
The frost retreats
The sun appears from behind the arctic cloud
I warm it, and it moves peacefully on
In its absence I blow on the dying cinders
I render the land fruitful and chase death away
Oh, you carried to me the fragrance of manna and quails,

You drew my hand to hidden treasure
... /
("The Cave")
267
Whatever I desired appeared.
I was ashamed of my poverty,
I shed my blood, slashed my jugular vein.
Do not hide in the caves of the horizon,
Ruddy and iron-barricaded!
My eyes have been transfixed
Lidless, to the iron sky
And I am afraid that a brimstone storm
May explode the laughter of madness in them.
I no longer know who you arei
The red curse is on my lips
And on my lips, pain and prayers
Shame exposes my isolate cave
Lonely among the distant caves
And do I scream at him-

The beseecher of impossibilities-
The mighty magician who was here, and died?
How the rags disintegrate
From the corpse of the mighty one,
How they fall down, like strange ghosts
Who pass and are scattered at the roadside!
Mother, do not implore me
In the dusk with your tears, I have no faith in:
" Behind the eaves, behind the desert of the shore . "
" A spade, a fiel.d, a Zibrctry and a house. "
... /
("The Cave")
My reign over the genii of the caves and the sea!

The manna and the quails
And the wine from a new jar!
What else but a hungry cave,
Stagnant mouth
And a hollow hand that writes and erases
The hollow lines in listless motion?
These hands of the clock do not turn:
My God, how the minutes stretch their legs

And freeze, and change into ages!
- by Khalil Hawi (1965)
268
269
The Magi in EuroEe
Wisemen from the East, Zed by a star ...

And when they saw the child, they knelt
and worshipped him.
o magi from the East, have you come through

The agony of the sea to the land of civilization
To see what God
Is revealed anew in the stable?
Here is the road, here is the star
Here is the traveller's supply of food!
The venturous star led us
Across Paris .
We tested the dwellings of thought
We shunned intellect on the Day of Masquerades

And in Rome, the temptations of the priests in the
embers of censers
Clouded the star, effaced it
Then we lost it in London, were lost
In the fog of the coal, in a symbol of commerce!
On Christmas Eve, no star
No children's faith in a child and a stable
On Christmas Eve--at midnight--trouble
An emptying street
sad laughter
And we descended in the cursed corridor to the stables

of the city
Eyes that answer from door to door
Eyes we question:
Where is the stable?
And we found a door with a red lantern, inscribed:
. . ./
( If
The Magi
in Europe" )
270
EarthZy Paradise! Here is no snake to seduae

And no judge to throw stones
Here the roses have no thorns
And the naked are innoaent.
Take off these borrowed faces

Stripped from the skin of the despised chameleon!
--We neither take faces off nor put them on
We are from Beirut--born tragedies
With borrowed faces and minds.
An idea of injustice is born in the brothels
Then passes through life defacing virginities
II
Take off these borrowed faces"
And we entered like those who enter

The night of the graves
A fire burned, and bodies swayed
To the fire dance and musician's tunes
The darkness of the ceiling changed
Into crystal, chandeliers and blueness
And the dripping rot turned
On the walls to wine, and the mud of the roads to gold
And the wine distilling the bodies
Freed them of water and clay
And we united, nerves, heart, blood.
You are in the EarthZy Paradise ..
You are a prayer .. Heaven is on earth.
. . ./
(fl
The Magi
in Europe" )
And we knelt in reverence to the chemistry

And to a magician
Who gathered paradise from the night of the graves
And we worshipped him, a God revealed in the stable
o God of the weary,

God of the lost
o God escaping from the heat of the sun

And from the horror of certitude
Who hides in the stable
In the caves of the underworld
From the land of civilization
- by Khalil Hawi (1957)
271
272
The Prisoner
My fear is gone now:
are my senses mad?
Have the echoes returned--is my head whirling?

Who has shaken the prison night from my chest,
And that nightmarish wall?
For an age the blind stovepipe hole has been clogged
with dust.
But what is this?
Now it is split by daylight,
And an echo invites me to escape!
The sun through the opening, the children's laughter,
Remnants of life in a wasted field
That knew my shadow, my tOil,
My hand singing to the grain-

All invite me to escape.
Is that delirious echo back?
Is it the whirling in my head?
How often has that echo beguiled me,
How often have my nails
Combed and scraped the prison wall,
And split on the deceiving stones?
Close the prison door to daylight;
It was long ago

I dreamt of amnesty and escape
Before the seconds rusted in my heart,
. . ./
(" The Prisoner II
273
Before there was an echo to compute them, before the

feverish waiting,
Before I was swallowed by the prison dark,
Before the dust gnawed at my eyelids,
Before my cramped limbs dropped
Into dust and decay, the bones scattered
By mice-feet, to rot over the years.
--How can they draw together again, grow supple, and live,
Or dream of a return?
What return would death make to the feeble creature?
What visions die in the smoke of the cafe,
And what escape is there from one hiding place to the next?
The jailor's foul tongue
Stirs poison in my wounds.
The desire of the phoenix has died in the ashes,
And she and the world conceal their mutual hatred;
How will she draw together again, grow supple, and live?
What nonsense does that insolent jailer mutter?
He has brought me amnesty for punishment
Now that my bones have been rotting for years.
Shall I leave them here and go my way,
Faceless, with hollow limbs,
A wind-whipped ghost
Disgraced by the sunlight
And the children's laughter,
Dodging between the walls?
. . ./
(" The Prisoner II
274
Close the prison door to daylight:
It was long ago
That I dreamt of amnesty and escape.
- Khalil Hawi (Apr. 1957)
275
Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa'id)

(1930
The Syrian-born poet, critic, editor and literary histo
rian,
'Ali Ahmad Sa'id, or "Adonis," received a master's
degree in literature from the Syrian University in Damascus

and left with his wife, the literary critic Khalida Sa'id
(nee Saleh) for Lebanon while in his mid-twenties.
He has
lived there since and become a Lebanese citizen, teaching

and working as a journalist and editor.
In 1957 he co
founded the avant-garde poetry magazine
Shier
al-Khal
with Yusuf
and remained actively involved with the magazine
for some years, interrupted only by a year Spent in France

when he won a scholarship to study at the Sbrbonne.
In
1968 he launched a monthly magazine, Mawaqif [Stands] as

a vehicle for progressive modes of thought, poetic and other
wise--an extension and renewal of the aims of Shier, which
he left in the hands of al-Khal.
The magazine flourished,
and still enjoys a wide readership.
In 1973 Adonis received
a doctorate from the Institut de Lettres Orientales at

St. Joseph University, Beirut.
Adonis has accomplished the formidable task of supplan
ting stilted literary Arabic with a finely tuned, vigorous
modern idiom, and is foremost among the contemporary theo
rists of Arabic metrical free verse.
He has also experi
mented successfully with long prose poems.
Though far from
being an advocate of historical discontinuity, Adonis has
276
consistently attempted to challenge conventions of thought

through conventions of language, basing his rebellion on
the insight that overthrowing the past is the first step
towards fulfilling and extending it.
Political and meta
physical themes have always co-existed in his work.
As his
pen name suggests, Adonis was prominent in the ranks of the

"Tammuzi" poets who, beginning with Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
in the 1950's, drew from the regenerative myth of Tammuz, or
Adonis, a symbolic language for the insidious forces of decay
and expectations of rebirth in their society.
Since this
phase, the inauguration of his career, Adonis has initiated

his own modernist movement, disseminating his "rejectionist"
philosophy through Mawaqif.
He has become an unrivalled force
in Arabic poetry, shaping the concepts of Arabic modernism of

the 1970's and 1980's.
Adonis's books of poetry include Awraq fi l-Rih [Leaves
in the Wind) (1958), Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi [Songs of Mihyar
the Damascene) (1961), Kitab al-Tahawwulat wa l-Hijra fi Aqalim
al-Layl wa l-Nahar [The Book of Changes and Migrations in the
Regions of Night and Day] (1965), Al-Masrah wa l-Maraya [The
Stage and-the Mirrors] (1968), Waqt Bayn al-Ramad wa I-Ward
[Time Between Ashes and Roses] (1970), Mufrad bi-Sighat al
Jam' (Singular in the Form of plural] (1975), and Kitab alQasa)id al-Khams [The Book of Five Poems] (1980).
He is a noted
anthologist of Arabic poetry and has written a definitive

study of the tradition in three volumes entitled Al-Thabit
wal-Mutahawwil [The Mutable and Immutable] (1974) .
277
The New Noah
We travel in the ark with our God-promised oars,

alive under the rain
And the mud, while others die.
We travel with the waves, and the dead
Are strung across the
To theirs.
horizon~
we link our lives
Between us
And the sky is a window to pray from:
If
God,
why did you save us alone
Of all people and creatures?
Where will you send us--to your other land?
To our own country
And the blood of death, the wind of life?
o God,
in our veins
We fear the sun,

We despair of
the light
We dread a tomorrow
Where life must be started allover again."
We travel in the ark with our God-promised oars,

and under the rain
Mud hugs the eyes of the others.
They die in the mud while we are saved
From death, from the deluge:
oblations
In this bowl that turns, or does not turn.
. .. /
("The New Noah ")
278
"Had we never become the seed

Of creation, for the earth and its generations-
Had we never been dust
Or cinders, but remained in some limbo-
We would never have had to see the world, its hell
And its God, twice.
o God, put us to death with all the other creatures.
We wish for the end, we long to be
Dust.
Do not give us life!"
If time rolls back to the beginning,
If water immerses the face of life again
If the universe trembles and God hastens to ask me:
"Noah, save
The living!
II
I will not heed His words.
I will come in my ark with a poet

And a free rebel;
We shall travel together
Heedless of Godls words.
We will open our hearts to the flood,
Dive in the mud and strip pebbles
And clay from the eyes of the floating;
We will whisper in their veins that we
Have made the ascent,
Emerged from the cave,
... /
(liThe New Noah")
279
And changed the course of time.
We have not bent our sails to fear
Or listened to God's words.
Death is
our rendez-vous, and our shores
A familiar despair;
we have accepted
Its icy sea and iron waters;
We have crossed and reached its end.
Heedless of that God,
We long for a new one
- by Adonis ('Ali Ahmad Sa'id)

(Spring lY58)
280
A Dialogue
Who are you?
Whom do you choose, Mihyar?
Wherever you turn there is God
Or Satan's pit.
One pit vanishes, one reappears
And the world is a choice.
I neither choose God nor do I 'choose Satan:
They both are walls
And block my sight.
And shall I exchange one wall for another?
Mine is the room of enlightenment,
The room of one who knows everything.
- by Adonis (<'Ali Ahmad Sa' id)

(1961J
281
The Fall
I live between the fire and the plague

With my language--with this mute universe.
I live in the apple garden and the sky
In the first joy and the first despair
In Eve's arms
A master of those cursed trees
A master of the fruits,
I live between the clouds and lightning
In a growing stone, in a book
That teaches the secrets and the fall.
- by Adonis (~Ali Ahmad SaLid)
(1961)
282
The Language of Sin
I burn my inheritance, I say that my land
Is virginal, that there are no graves in my youth.
I am above God and Satan,
My ways are deeper than their ways.
In my book I walk
In the procession of the blazing thunderbolt,
In the procession of the green thunderbolt.
I shout--there is no Paradise, no Fall after me,
And I erase the language of sin.
- by Adonis (~Ali Ahmad Sa(id)

(1961)
283
The Road
road which refuses to begin:
We were a face upturned

To the day, and loved the living presence-
In our land there was a God,
But he was forgotten as soon as he left,
And we burnt behind him the waxen Temple
And all our oblations.
Now in the absence we have formed
An idol of dust,
And pelted it with sanctities
On the road which was about to begin.
Road, you do not know where to begin.
- by Adonis ((Ali Ahmad Sa<id)

(1965)
284
A Vision
Our city has run away
So I ran in search of its alleys
I looked--and saw nothing but the horizon.
I saw those who would run away the next day
And return the next day
As flesh.
I rend it on paper.
And I saw--the clouds were a throat;
The waters, walls of flame;
I saw a sticky yellow thread-

A thread of history, that clung to me
From a hand that has inherited a sex of dolls,
An ancestry of rags.
It chews, knots, and loosens my days.
I entered the world in the womb of waters and

virginity of trees
I saw trees to tempt me,
I saw rooms between their branches,
Beds and windows, set to resist me.
I saw children, and to them I read
My fortune,
Read the books of the clouds and verses of the stone;
And I saw how they travelled with me.
. .. /
( "A Vision")
285
I saw how the lakes of
Tears, and corpse of the rain, shine behind them.
Our city has run away--What am I? What?
Am I a stalk of wheat
Crying for a lark
Dead beyond the snow and the cold-

Dead, before her letters about me have come to light,
When she has written to no one?
I asked her, and saw her corpse
Cast down at the end of time
And I screamed, "Silence of ice, I am
A country to her exile.
I am the stranger, and her grave is my country."
And I saw how my face changed
Into a river coursing with blood
And ships departing, disappearing
I saw that my shores are an invitation
To drown, and my waves are the wind and the pelicans
And rejection is a shattered pearl;
Its fragments settle on my ship's deck.
And rejection is a woodcutter who lives on
286
("A Vision")
My face--who collects me for immolation.

And rejection makes distances to scatter me.
I see my blood, and see behind my blood
My death remonstrate and pursue me.

I saw how my shroud illumines me
And I saw .... Would death relent a little?
- by
Adonis (~Ali Ahmad Sa'id)
(1961)
287
The Crow's Feather

I
Coming without flowers or fields,
Coming without seasons,
I possess nothing in the sand, nothing in the winds,
Nothing in the glory of the dawn
Only youthful blood
That runs with the sky;
And the earth in my prophetic forehead
Is an endless flock of birds.
Coming without seasons,
Coming without flowers or fields,
In my blood is a stream of dust:
I live in my eyes,
I eat of my eyes.
Living, I spend life awaiting
A ship that will circuit the universe
And dive to the ocean floor
As though dreaming or confused
As though parting, not to return.
II
In the cancer of silence, in isolation
I write my poems on the soil
With a crow's feather.
I know no light on my eyelids-
(" The Crow' s Feather" )
288
I know nothing but the wisdom of the dust.
All day in the cafe I sit
With the wood of the chair
And a dead cigarette butt,
I sit awaiting
A forgotten rendez-vous.
III
I want to kneel, I want to pray
To the owl with the broken wing,
To the embers, to the winds.
I want to pray to a hidden star in the sky,
To death and to disease-

And in my incense burn
My white days and my songs,
My notebook and the ink, and inkwell.
I want to pray
To all gods ignorant of prayer.
IV
Beirut does not appear on my road.
Beirut does not bloom, though these are my fields.
Beirut bears no fruit,
Yet here is the spring with grasshoppers
and sand in my fields.

Alone, without flowers or seasons,
... /
("The Crow's Feather")
289
From sunset to sunrise

Alone among the fruits
I cross Beirut and do not see it,
I live in Beirut and do not see it.
Alone among the fruits, with love
I travel with the day
To another city.
- by Adonis (<:Ali Ahmad Sac' id)

(1957)
290
A Mirror of the Stone
Naked under God's palm trees,
Wearing the sand of the years
I played with my idols,
I built heavens for others
With my dust.
Oh wandering Prophet of words,
Prophet of the journey--you who are
coming to us-
In the rain-laden winds I knew,
Despair itself knew you were
coming to us
And knew you a revered prophet.
So we knelt
And called:
"You who are coming to us,
Lost, trailing fire and exile-
We accept you as a God and a friend
In the mirrors of the stone."
Prophet of the journey,
I accept you as a God and a friend
In the mirrors of the stone.
.. ./
( "A Mirror of the Stone")
291
Today I sing to the clouds in your name

And between my heart and the sky
I will build,
At the edges of the stars,
A wall that bears the features
of the people
And the skies.
And I will sing to the clouds:
My face is a stone, and only the stone
will I worship.
- by Adonis ('Ali Ahmad Sa(id)

(1961)
292
The Days of the Hawk
The
1-law~
" The horses drew up, and they shouted to us

from the shore:
Come back, both of you, and no
harm will befall you!
kept swimming, and my
brother, just a boy, swam too.
I looked towards
him to strengthen his heart; he did not hear me,

enticed by their promises and fearing to drown.
He turned and made haste towards them while I
crossed the Euphrates.
They offered my young
brother safety, and he delivered himself into

their hands.
They struck at his neck and carried
off his head as I was watching .... He was only a

boy of thirteen.
Then
looked upon my face, and
thought I was a bird, though I walked on my feet. "

- ~bd al-Rahman aZ-DakhiZ,
The Hawk of Quraish
. . ./
(" The Days of the Hawk")
293
Over my face the spears have been stilled between

rider and victim;
My body rolls, death drives fast, and the winds
Shiver like dangling corpses and wail of an elegy-
As though the day
Were a stone that pierces life,
As though the day
Were a carriage of tears.
Calm the ringing,
Listen to the voice of the Euphrates:
" Quraish* is a caravan
sailing towards India,
Carrying from Africa, from Asia to India,
Carrying the fire of glory."
Here the sky melts into a wound, and the banks
Whisper and coil:
There is a language
Between the banks and me,
A dialogue between us.
The pikefish take it up, and bear it aloft like a boat.
My Euphrates, be to me a bridge, be to me a mask" -
And I sink.
*The tribe of the Prophet, Muhammad.
. . ./
(" The Days of the Hawk" )
294
Calm the ringing; listen to the voice of the Euphrates:
" Quraish
Is a pearl that shines from Damascus,
Hidden under the boat and tow line,
Softer than Lebanon's longing,
More beautiful than the East can tell. "
... And If in a horizon of grasshoppers, under
the wounded clouds,

Am
a stone with dead wings,
Am
a stone with dead quills-
Death entwines its victims

And the sacrificial pelicans writhe.
Let the echos change,
Listen to the voice of the Euphrates:
" Quraish,
Nothing of the tribe of the Quraish remains
But the blood spurting like spears-
Nothing remains_J:U.lt the wound. "
Open, 0 wilderness, the rusty hinges of your doors:

I am a king, and the sky is my own,
and my steps are my kingdom.
I am a king advancing, and build on my conquests
Over this deep-formed ice, over the ungovernable.
. .. /
( If
The Days of the Hawk" )
295
I know how to wound the sand, how to plant in its

wound the palm trees,
I know how to resurrect the dead sky.
And the road rolls out its terror and it contracts.

It is a road of mirrors,
Books and mirrors.
I read its contents,
I stare at it,
I trace in it the hero who paced with a lover's steps,
I read the steps and the grass and palm trees and a
horizon,
Woven with small sighs
Where the burning never ceases,
Where the noble steps are endless.
In the crevices
I seek the shade,
I feel the minutes,
I shake the breast of the
wild~erness-
I walk on
Sharper than the arrow, sharper.
I wound the pebbles and the dust.
. .. /

296
The earth is narrower than the shadow of my spear--dying

I hear the hands tick on my watch, I lead the wildcats
into unknown regions;
Dying, I cling to the earth more patient than the earth
itself: dying
I am poured over the shoulders of the wind.
I pray,
I whisper even to the stones,
I read the stars, I write and erase their address,
I draw my desire like a map,
My blood the ink, and inside me the universe.
I lie waking between my roots and branches; the waters

dry off,
The tips of the twigs are laden with dry flowers and
gentle graves;
I ascend the signs of the Zodiac where tragedy is,
Where ashes fall,
Where sobbing begins and wandering ends.
If I knew, like the poet, how to change the seasons,
If I knew how to talk to inanimate things,
I would hypnotize the grave of the child-hero on
the Euphrates,
My brother's grave on the shore of the Euphrates.
"He died unwashed, unburied, without a prayer."
... /
( "The Days of the Hawk It )
297
And I would say to the seasons and to the unliving things:
Connect like these skies,
Increase the Euphrates,
Let it pour water, green as the olive trees
Through my ardent blood, through my lucid history.
If, like the poet, I knew how to speak to things,
If I knew how to change the seasons,
I would say to the Euphrates, extend like the Shed of Islam,*
Let Poetry alone elect the Caliph.
If, like the poet, I could join the farmer
In his weddings,
I would convince the naked trees to have children.
If, like the poet, I could tame phenomena,
I would change every stone to a cloud
That would rain over Damascus and the Euphrates.
If, like the poet, I knew how to change the fates,
If I knew how to dwell
In the water, in the buckthorn, in the olive trees
As a prophetic warning, or a sign,
I would scream, 0 cloud,
Thicken and rain
*After the death of the Prophet, Muhammad, his followers

convened in a shed close to the place of his death in order
to select a successor, Abu Bakr.
Thus the word, as-saqifah
[shed] has acquired special significance for Moslems.
(fl
The Days of the Hawk")

298
In my name over Damascus and the Euphrates
In the name of God ...
The sky opens,
It changes into soil,
Into books, and in every book is God.
Awakened,
The sleep of stone is gone from my face, and no mirage
is now in my eye.
A sign comes from the Euphrates:
I am he who lives in the dove's necklace,
In the flock of migrating swallows,
Humble as the fortune-teller
Whose vision and sign
Dwell in the sky in many languages.
I am the Euphrates and the island
A sign
Hold back, my longing!
In my forehead weaves
A river of nets,
Of willow leaves and of arak trees;
In my forehead flows
A river of incense
More delicious than the perfume of the ages,
More beautiful than the East reveals.
. .. /
( ,. The Days of the Hawk")

299
The hawk in the desert of the veins, in the cities

of the mind,
The hawk, like a halo, is inscribed on the gate of the
island.
And the hawk is embroidered on the cloak of the desert,
The hawk lives in the longing, in the confusion
between the dream and the tears.
And the hawk in his wandering, in his birth-giving

darkness,
Builds on the summit in limitless passion-
A beloved Andalusia,
An Andalusia rising above Damascus.
He carries to the West the harvest of the East.
The hawk writes to the sky, to a generous unknown,
Asking about a place as clean as his veins.
The hawk waves to other hawks-

Tired, his wandering carries him, the rocks support him.
Leaning above them,
He nurtures his wanderings, he nurtures the rocks.
His face presses forward and the sun drives fast,
And the sky is
A fireplace,
And the wind is an old woman telling her stories,
. . ./
And the hawks are

A procession that opens the sky,
Travels
Crosses the morning,
Dips,
Repeats and
Raises, loverlike, in explosive rebellion
Under the spell of passion and radiance
A beloved Andalusia.
He raises it to the universe -- this, the new temple
In whose name all the skies are a book,
In whose name every wind is an
anthem~
- by Adonis ('Ali Ahmad Saeid)

(Spring, 1962)
300
301
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

(1926
One of the most influential figures in contemporary
Arabic literature, a poet, critic, novelist and translator,
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was born in Bethlehem
and educated at the
Arab College in Jerusalem and at Cambridge and Harvard Uni

versities in London.
Since the creation of the State of
Israel in his homeland he has lived in Iraq, and taught for

some years at the University of Baghdad.
As a Palestinian, Jabra has sought to express in his
poetry the anger,
bewilderment
and alienation experienced
by his countrymen, uprooted from their land and its traditions.

The challenge of adapting to the modern world should be a
supreme concern of the Arabs, according to Jabrai the sense
of dispossession and instability suffered most acutely by the
Palestinians reflects the state of the Arab world at large,
hovering on the brink of changes which will transform the
very fabric of their society.
Jabra has been instrumental in shaping the course of
modern Arabic poetry in many respects.
He introduced Badr
Shakir al-Sayyab to Sir James Frazer's mythological history

of Tammuz, a figure which became central to al-Sayyab's poetry
and subsequently to that of an entire generation of Arab poets,
including Jabra himself.
An influential critic in the field
of comparative literature and a talented translator in both

English and Arabic, Jabra was also among the first to recog
302
nize the potential significance of T.S. Eliot's The Waste

Land
to Arabic poetic modernism.
Besides lecturing widely
on the topic in British universities, he has published collec

tions of his literary criticism in Arabic and encouraged
many young Iraqi poets and artists, thus significantly
affecting the course of their artistic development.
Jabra's volumes of poetry include Tammuz fi l-Madina
[Tammuz in the City] (1959) and AI-Madar al-Mughlaq [The Closed
Circuit] (1964).
His works of- fiction include r.Arag wa Qisas
Ukhra [A-rag and Other Stories] (1956) and the novels Surakh fi
Layl Tawil [Screams in a Long Night] (1955), Al-Safina [The
Ship] (1970), and, in English, Hunters in a Narrow Street
(Heinemann, 1960). His critical essays have been collected
in al-Hurriyya wa l-Tufan [Freedom and the Deluge] (1960) ,
Al-Rihla al-Thamina [The Eighth Journey] (1967), and Al-Nar
wa l-Jawhar [Fire and Essence] (1947) .
303
Beyond Galilee
When I lived with Christ,

Died with him and was resurrected
My voice was still shouting in the wilderness
A voice unlike my own,
Burning with an unfamiliar fire-
Whose fire?
Give me shade and cold water,
And I will hang my memories on
A wall in some deserted room.
The crowd has scattered, and the guests have left;
The voice shouts in vain
Like the voice of all that came before
Death and Galilee.
On my lips are traces of honey
And hemlock.
Have I come after death to listen to my voice
Pulling me towards a long-deserted void?
Give me shade!
And you, woman,
Put a chunk of ice in your water.
The sun is burning.

Is tiresome.
For whom?
Life after death
And still my voice is attracted by the fire.
For whom
Have I closed my eyes, while on my lips were
Those traces of honey and of hemlock?
- by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1962)
304
The Poet and Women
Which one; which one?

While I still walk among them
The sun is warm over the palm trees
Untouched lips cry
Love's in the body, in the flesh and the bones
And sinful lips clamour ...
A tremor of the spirit:
Which one?
Is it she who splashes water about with a splinter
of diamond
To watch it shine, or is it she whose golden laugh
Would cool the heat of midday?
Is it she who can summon back a dance from the past
With the twinkle of an eye or the wave of a hand?
"Cheeks of fire and cheeks of smoke,
And the laughter has a golden ring ... "
Don't I fabricate lies to entertain them,
And wrap the wound in silken cloth!
I discover lips like cherries
Over the naked teeth
I make their slow days behind drawn curtains
Fly like morning dreams
And when I desert them, one by one
And open a window that overlooks the yellow river
I see a leg bone
. . ./
( .. The Poet and Women" )
305
Planted on the muddy bank, and a swooping crow

Drop a marigold from his beak.
A question in my mind persists:
Which one?
How can I answer?
Should I tell how one drew her face close,
Her lips like a cup of rubies
Picturing the god of love
Bound in chains?
How I waited for another in the darkness

of her yard,
The goddess of night on her lips

Who feared only the frankness of daybreak?
Of a third, on whose lips words shone
Like splinters of glass on a moonlit night?
Which one?
The crow swoops
Upon fleshless ribs,

Plants marigolds in skulls' eyes.
I have seen eyes infinitely deep
And eyes like Andalusian treasure;
I have seen eyes swift as wild horses,
Eyes murderous as tigers
" Lips of fire, lips of ashes ... "
Eyes that promise forbidden passion
And eyes that close all doors behind them;
Eyes which offer the eyelids like pleading hands
And flaming eyes with shining blades.
. .. /
(" The Poet and Women" )

306
" And tears are a stream that runs in the mud .. "
Which one; which one?
Is it she who has worn a black garment
To declare mourning
ever since the budding of her breasts?
" Eyes of fire, eyes of ashes

And tears are a stream that runs in the mud .. "
Is it she who dropped the veil from her face
And saw around her endless iron chains?
" Hands of fire, hands of ashes
And tears are a stream that runs in the mud .. "
Is it she to whom I said, behind the demolished wall:
" God I s garden is in this body" ?
" Breasts of fire, breasts of ashes
And tears are a stream in the mud .. "
Which one?
What use to ask:
the garden hedge is yellow,
Ten suns stream down

Disease on the sloughs,
And on the riverbanks
Bones collect among the wheat.
A crow swoops across the river
Snatches the skin from the skull,
Strips the flesh from the chest, and forgets
To leave a marigold between the ribs.
- by JabraIbrahim
(1959)
Jabra-~
307
The City
Look at the deserted street in the dark,
And the closed doors of shops;
Look at the street stretched in the morning.
Did you rest between the closing and opening of doors
In untroubled sleep?
Mine was burdened with dreams.
I live with shadows and lanterns.
I feel a twinge of pain for each individual light
And still, I see only shadows in the night
And in the morning.
At every closed door the passerby lays down his pain,
A shadow that swells and stretches
For every vagabond desire.
At the doorways
the shadows spring
From the desires of passersby:
Between self and self,
Between sterility and disease.
And into the crevices of sleep the night flings
Ulcerated bodies, trees
Whose fruits are spat on the ground to rot.
. . ./
308
( "The City")
Have you seen your fingers dry
Hard as shiny nails?
Each nail is the worm from a carcass
Sliding on the circle of lights in your brain,
So that you only see the swaying shadows
Distend and crowd the doors and sidewalk.
I live with these lights
Between the houses; I stand
On the weary soil that fears
The blows of the wind and the lash of the storm.
The blood in me is fruitless, and the phallus barren,
But in the hand the phallus spawns
A thousand worms
Without benefit of sunlight.
II
What is this barrenness in the blood?
13oredom is born every day, and I say
This nothingness
~t
least obliterates the preceding
day's boredom,
Sympathy and solace;

But the days that never come back
Drag the remains of the years
To unmarked graves,
... /
(liThe City")
309
And spin, too, in seasons.

The seed grows a stalk which contains
The fury of winter and the joy of spring
And if the sun blows on its fire
The fruit is kindled, laughing for every hand
And the gold-heaped laps reply.
The spirit in the street trussed

With ropes of light and shadow still bears
Some hollow straws in the wind
That lie shivering in dread of
The wind's blows and the lash of the storm.
III
I heard the street whimper itself to sleep,
I saw the houses pile bones
Upon bones;
I saw their inhabitants, hunted by dreams
Raise their empty hands and,cry:
"If only the storms would cease to rage!"
Wouldn't storms lift the shadow
And rid them of ghosts
That the sap might flow from their roots
And fill the branches with buds and flowers?
. . ./
("The City")
310
I have often mocked the shadows and danced;

Seen the fog encircle the sun at noon
And sung and danced anew.
I've often sat in a sidewalk cafe
Looking at moving lips
Which mark the events of nothing.
Though I know the face hides a spirit
Which may at any time break into passion
I see only faces constrained
Like the sea on a pale, meandering afternoon.
This one coughs and that one says:
Let me smoke another cigarette
To kill the time.
Or would anyone else like to converse
About his spirit, the house of shadows,
The house of the sun, that wavers
Between the longing called lust, and the longing
called hunger and unrest?
They say to me:
Hurry along,
Clear the road!
We are building
High rises in this city

From clay that crumbles,
From inflamed eyes
And feet that split.
. . ./
(liThe City")
311
A hundred died yesterday,
A hundred will die today,
And tomorrow, another hundred
To build alleys
From the muscles of eyes and the skin of feet.
Beyond the roads are sky-wide valleys
And the wind-strewn flowers
Of thousands of trees.
But they say to me:
No,
There are only dark roads in the valleys;
Are the trees not clouded
Like our houses and all who live in them?
The breath of noon is a dusty gale
That sweeps the leaves of colour.
Is nothing left to me but the scream
In the circle of a night
I woundeg.
And each blind lantern
Has wounded .
Will I sink in our well and perish
If every day lips fallon my body
Like hammers
And skulls lurk under my bread?
--A shiver passed through the houses?
... /
312
("The City")
In the pursuit of sleep the city cries

And moans.
IV
Look at the deserted street in the dark.
Darkness mantles the shops
And the light never finds them--the doors are fitted
With forbidding latches.
The passerby bows under the pain
That grips him afresh at every door.
But when the storms blow

They sweep the dead from the sidewalk, obliterate
The lanterns and shadows,
And purge the eye and the foot.
Blow, storms,
And pry
The fingers of death from us;
Dismiss
The pain patrolling every door
And release
The scream of life in throats,
The hymns of dancers
In the road.
. .. /
("The City")
313
Descend
From the heights
Pregnant with the tides of the sea, and efface
All rotting things from sight.
Open the doors of the city to the great sea;
Turn angry waves into the shadow-houses
To scour the corners and the floors.
Sweep out
The iron chains; send the chains
Of bones and worms
Down to the black
Rocks at the bottom of the sea.
Let fertility surge from its blue caves
Into our land
And blood ..
And restore calm sleep to our nights.
Then will the sun burst forth
With blossoms and greenery for the city
And laughter will be heard from every
Window, room, and house.
- Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Spring 1958)
II.
(b)
In the Tammuzi Tradition
315
Salah ~Abd al-Sabur

(1931-1982)
An Egyptian by birth, and graduate of the University of
Cairo, 'Abd al-Sabur soon rose to an authoritative position
in the Egyptian literary scene in the capacities of poet,
essayist, editor and playwright.
Embodying humanistic as well
as socialist ideals, the late cAbd al-Sabur's poetry reveals

a personal vision that is quietly contemplative, and embued
with a sense of approaching death.
In his review of his
poetic career, Hayati maca al-Shi'r [My Life with Poetry]

(1969)
'Abd al-Sabur attributes to poetry a moral and spiri
tual value which he regards as mystical.
Though known to have
socialist sympathies, here he explicitly attacks the conven

tional Marxist view, pointing out that poetry must affirm
truth and human justice.
Working with Lewis 'Awad on the literary supplement of
al-Ahram newspaper, cAbd al-Sabur came to share his enthusiasm
for modern movements in poetry in the West, particularly as
exemplified in the poetry of T.S. Eliot.
He attempted to
introduce previously unacceptable realistic themes to Arabic

poetry
in the innovative spirit with which Eliot had trans
formed English poetry, and experimented more extensively than

any other major modern Arab poet in the genre of drama in
free verse.
Some of his notable publications include al-Nas
fi Biladi [The People in My Country] (1957), Aqulu Lakum [I Say
316
unto You] (1961), Ah1am aI-Faris a1-Qadim [Dreams of the Ancient

Knight] (1964), Aswat a1-'Asr [Voices of the Age] (1961),
Wa Tabga a1-Ka1ima [And the Word Remains] (1970), and 'Umr
min aI-Hub [The Age of Love]-(1973).
free verse is
(1965).
Ma~sat
a1-Hallaj
His best known play in
[The Tragedy of a1-Ha11aj]
cAbd a1-Sabur's collected poems as well as plays
aooeared in Beirut in 1972.
317
The Saint
Come to me, come to me,

The poor, the sick, the strangers
The broken-hearted and broken-limbed, I have set my table
Come to me, come to me
We shall eat a crumb from the wisdom of the ages
Dipped in the foolishness of our joyous age
We will break that bread, thank our calm hearts
And they will lead us to the shores of certitude,
For intellect has blown our sails astray.
Come to me, come to me
I have journeyed like a tourist on paper,
My pen was my horse
Delusions and drowsiness my companions
Long years in the midst of the waves, and the darkness

of logic
And when the darkness fell over all creatures,
When my heart longed for the shore
And shadows danced over the insomniacs
I sought my naked corner near the tired lantern,
I took decayed bones and skulls from their graves
To sit by my table conversing in whispers and screams
And, bored, when the silence spread they would linger
Till arrows of dawn appeared, then disperse like illusions
. . ./
(rr
The Saint II
318
They told me
That the river is not the river, and man is no longer man
That the hovering of this star is music
That the truth of the world dwells in a cave
That the truth of the world is in a calloused palm
And that God has created man, and gone to sleep
And that God was in the doorkey to the house
And that you should not ask a drowned man flung on his face
in the sea
To fill his stomach with grass, and seashells, and water.
Such a man was I:
And one morning I saw the truth of the world
And heard the music of the stars, the waters, and the flowers
I saw God in my heart one morning
When I awoke, threw the books in the fire, and opened
my window.
In my soul was the scent of dawn; I went out
To look at the strollers in the streets, and the people
seeking food.
In the shadows of the gardens I saw flocks of lovers
And in a moment
I felt my feverish body pulse like the heart of the sun,
I felt the chambers of my heart fill with wisdom.
Then I knew I had become a saint
. .. /
(" The Saint U
319
And my mission
Was to bless you all
- by Salah 'Abd al-Sabur
(1961)
320
Song for Winter
This year's winter tells me

That I will die alone
In the same way, some winter .
This evening tells me that I will die alone
One evening, too.
The sum of my past is nothing;
I am living in a wilderness.
This year's winter whispers how my insides
Shiver with the cold
And that my heart has been dead since autumn-
Withered with the first leaves,
Fell with the first drop of rain.
Each night's frost drives it deeper
Into the stony earth, nor would it
Reach up from the snow
With roses
If summer came to arouse it.
This year's winter tells me that my flesh is sick
And my breath rasps like thorns.
Each of my steps is a venture.
I may die as my foot falls
Among the throngs in the city
Where no one knows me,
And none will weep.
. ../
(" Song for Winter 11
321
It may be said when my friends gather:

His place was here, and he passed on-
God rest his soul.
This year's winter tells me that what I thought
My cure, was my poison-

Falling under the grip of this poetry.
How many years I have .been wounded, I cannot tell:
My head still bleeds.
Embracing my downfall,
For poetry I destroyed what I had built,
Went forth
And was crucified for it.
Hanging, the cold and dark and the thunder
Struck fear in my breast;
When I called on Him, He did not answer
And I knew I had lost all I had.
This year's winter tells me that to survive
We must store from the summer's heat and hoard

its memories;
But like the sinner, I scattered in the fall
The wheat and grain I'd harvested.
This winter sentences me
To die alone
In the same way, some year.
- by Salah Abd al-Sabur (1964)
322
Salem Haggi
(1937?
An Egyptian poet and devoted student of Salah 'Abd al
Sabur, Salem Haqqi has written mostly traditional poetry in
the past, but of late has turned his attention to metrical
free verse with greater effect.
Besides contributing to
various Egyptian literary magazines, he has published a

collection of poems, Hawa al-Arba'in [Love at Forty] (1978).
323
Sinbad's Last Journey
,.
(In Memory of Salah ~Abd al-Sabur)
What will quench death?
Our stream is dry
The water displaced, the river cleft
Not a drop is left in the cup ...
Our land is in ruins
The fields parched and wasted,
The nightingale has deserted his nest .
Even sound has ceased.
All things around us now are dead.
The star has mounted far up into the sky
And all at once dusk has fallen
Be fore evening.
Oh, you who harvest a flower from us every day-
Every day, a flower-
Death, who never has enough
Of the poets' blood!
A Sinbad
Set sail to roam the seas
And the deserts,
To roam the earth and the shores and the distant isles
Where none had set foot before,
Seeking the wisdom of verse and speech,
Observing the lives of men-
He has not rested since he returned
From the land of elephant riders,
... /
( If
324
Sinbad I s Last Journey")
From the land of love and wisdom, the land of poetry

and the old magic,
Of Taigur and Ghandi, and wreaths of flowers.
Restless, his imagination summoned him
Back to the ship,
He longed
For faraway places
Rich with hidden meadows and secrets
Pregnant with legends, wisdom, and bounty.
Will Sinbad return again one day?
Will he return to the ancient land
Carrying gifts,
Carrying food,
As he returned before
Time after time,
Spreading scents over the land
Breathing his magic into the spirit,
Calling, sending forth his poems?
Or has he journeyed to the far land
Where no man walks,
Whence no man returns ...
While the waiting is long?
Grief to your friends,
The journey from which you never return,
Where the sailor casts his sails
... /
325
( " Sinbad' s Last Journey")
On the shores of eternity!
Sinbad,
your voice still calls us
Intimate, brave and fresh:
Zahran
l~ves
on
Although you leave us in the night.
- by Salem Haqqi (1982)
326
Isam Mahfuz
(1939
Poet, journalist, and man of letters, Isam Mahfuz
was born in Lebanon.
After completing his secondary edu
cation he entered the field of journalism. He has been the

sub-editor of the weekly magazine, Al-Hasna~, and is now an
associate editor of Al-Nahar newspaper.
His poetry is con
sistently written in metrical free verse, and constituted

a significant contribution to Shier [Poetry] magazine over
the eleven years of its publication.
journalists
Like many other poet
Mahfuz displays concern and sensitivity toward
the social ills which assume individual faces on every street

corner.
In 1968 Mahfuz received the Sa'id 'Agl prize for poetry
for his book, Al-Zanzalakht [The Bead Tree] (1964).
Among
his other publications are Al-TabiCatu l-Mayyita [Dead

Natures] (1959), Hasha)ish
Sayf wal-CAdhra'
al-~ayf
[Summer Grass] (1961), Al
[The Sword and the Virgin] (1961),
Al-Qatl [Murder] (1969)
and
327
A Birth
Between walls
there are lean young fingers
wasted with loneliness and longing
and the day's fatigue.
The shy wife does not refuse,
not a word does she say ..
And tomorrow the fields will shiver.
The fireplace
is a shivering infant's mouth;
the evil moon
creeps through their window and rests
on the heads of five little ones
eating dreams on a straw mat.
The edges of the shadows
gather
over houses with extinguished eyes.
The fireplace
chews the last cinder into ashes,
while the earth still breeds.
II
The airports of dreams in the evening
open the skies for me;
In my forehead the earth builds
(" A Birth" )
328
a bewitched gate
that sits coin-like in a corner of the sky.
The softness of the evening
is Jacob's ladder to heaven-
But the shadows of years upon years
turn in a young girl's disappointment,
and sweep all dreams away.
III
Darkness swells in my lungs,
Words soar in my mouth.
My eyes burn out like two cinders
and the spark of peace falls into ashes.
Isis spits on my forehead,
Time has cursed my dust.
What is left for me
on these wind-swept shores?
Love scorned,
an aborted woman in the jaws of the grave,
and the wounded flesh
bleeding in Venus' arms.*
- by Isam Mahfuz (1960)
*Ishtar (goddess of both fertility and war) in the

Babylonian/Assyrian legend.
329
Riyad Najib
al-~ayyis
(1937
The Lebanese poet and critic
Riyad Najib al-Rayyis
received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Cambridge

University in England, and returned to Beirut to pursue a
career in journalism as his father, Najib al-Rayyis, had
done.
He acted as the associate
editor of Al-Hayat news
paper from 1964 until 1966, and is now the chief foreign
correspondent for Al-Nahar.
He has been an active contributor of poetry, book
reviews and translations from English to Shier [Poetry]
magazine, and published a collection of his poems, Mawtu
l-Akharin [The Death of Others] in 1961.
Al-Rayyis' poetry
is incisively realistic, and reveals both the self and society

under an uncompromisingly critical light.
330
Night in the Reeling Tent
At the setting of each sun

my friends and I raise
our full glasses,
quaff them,
and toast each other
with dimmed eyes.
When we raise our glasses
we see only
the diminishing oil in the lanterns.
Our hands sway
when we raise the glasses
to drink a toast to the beautiful girls,
mistresses of the revelers;
and we wipe the sweat from our foreheads
with damp hands,
sleep with slimy bodies
and wake with wet vomit.
The clock strikes ten:
We all crowd
into the narrow tent
to empty the beer
and the tent shrills
with my friends' voices,
with drunken laughter,
... /
(" Night in the Reeling Tent" )
331
with the vomit of gorged stomachs

And the evening ends,
the night ends.
In the reeling tent
is a long road
where eyes are lost in the dust

of a sad love.
Our tired legs,

heavy with sadness, and lust, and beer,
carry us to caves where we sleep drivelling
with love.
We cover the pillows
with bitter tears
and hope for the morning,
and that the next evening will not bring
much dew, or rain, or fog;
that the perfume will linger on the pillows
and that we will not again be saturated with our tears.
The gaping of tired eyes
in the gloomy morning,
the dew on the lazy eyelids
do not awaken our bloodshot eyes, heavy with sleep,
full of wine and desire.
Lips sleep upon eyes
and suck the juices of life
... /
(It Night in the Reeling Tent")
wishing that the eyes would not open their lids

to the fog,
to the rain
to the chill
and that we would forget our tears on the pillow
and sink
in the mire of our sad loves
- by Riyad Najib al-Rayyis

(1960)
332
III.
Resistance Poetry
334
Mahmud Darwish
(1940
The free verse poems (both metrical and non-metrical)
of the Palestinian poet, Mahmud Darwish, deal predominantly
with Palestinian resistance and struggle.
The simple force
of his poetic expression is achieved through the use of

direct and uncomplicated language and a sharp appeal to
elemental human emotions.
Upon occasion he resorts to
symbolism derived from history or legends with great crea

tivity, as in his association of love for a beloved with
passion for his homeland.
Darwish has been influenced by
political and social changes
and
liberation movements through
out the world, on which subject he is an avid reader.
Unlike
many poets Darwish may claim to have lived his poetry, for
many a time he has faced imprisonment by the Israeli
autho
rities for his activities in the pro-Arab faction of the

country's Communist Party while living and working as a
journalist in Haifa.
In 1969 he won the Lotus Prize and
received it the following year at the Fourth Afro-Asian Wri

ter's Conference hosted in New Delhi.
Since leaving Israel
in 1971 he has resided in Beirut, and travels allover the

world reading his poems of resistance.
Darwish's collection of poems include Awraq al-Zaytun
[The Olive Leaves] (1964),
<Ashiq min Filistin
Lover from
Palestine] (1966), Akhir al-Layl [The End of Night] (1967)
335
Habibati Tanhadu min Nawmiha [My Love is Rising from Her

Sleep] (1970), A1- cAsafir Tamutu fi 1-Ja1i1 [The Birds Are
Dying in Galilee] (1970), Uhibbuki aw 1a Uhibbuki
I Love
You or I Don't Love You] (1972), Muhawa1a Ragm 7 [Attempt

No.7] (1974), and Ti1ka Suratuha wa-Hadha Intihar a1-'Ashig
[That is Her Picture and This is the Lover's Suicide] (1975).
His Diwan appeared in two volumes in 1979.
336
To the Reader
Black tulips in my heart,

Flames on my lips
From which forest did you come to me,
All you crosses of anger?
I have traded in my griefs
And embraced wandering and confusion.
Anger lives in my hands,
Anger lives in my mouth
And in the blood of my arteries swims anger.
reader,
Don't expect whispers from me,
Don't hope for a song:
This is my suffering!
A blow in the foolish sand,
And another in the clouds
Anger is all I am-

Anger, the tinder
Of fire
- by Mahmud Darwish (1964)
337
Soft Rain in a Distant Autumn
Soft rain in a distant autumn

And the birds are blue, blue
And the earth is a festival
Don't say that I am a cloud over the airport
I want nothing
Of my country that has fallen from the window
of the train
Except my mother's scarf
Soft rain in a strange autumn

And the windows are white, white
And the sun is an orange grove in setting,
And I am a stolen orange.
Why do you run from my flesh?
I want nothing
From the country of knives and birds
Except
~~
_Jilother 's scarf I
Soft rain in a sad autumn

And the trysts
are green, green
And the sun is clay.

Don't say we have seen you in the withering
(" Soft Rain in a Distant Autumn")
of jasmine,
Saleswoman of death, and aspirin!
My face is a dusk,
My death is a fetus
And I want nothing
From the country which has forgotten the
emigrants' accent
Soft rain in a distant autumn

And the birds are blue, blue
The earth is a festival;
The birds have flown into a time of no return.
Do you want to know my country,
Know what is between us?
My country is a desire in chains!
I have sent my kiss in the mail
And I want nothing
From the country which has slain me
- by Mahrnud Darwish (1970)
338
339
Of Poetry
Yesterday, we sang to a star behind a cloud

And we bathed in our tears.
Yesterday, we bickered with the vine trees
and the moon
With the nights, and fate,
And made love to women.
The hour struck, Khayyam drank on
And under the rhythm of his drugged songs
We remained poor as ever.
Poets, friends,
We are in a new world!
What has passed is dead, and whoever writes a poem
In the days of the atom and the wind
Creates prophets.
II
Our poems are without colour,
Voiceless and tasteless.
If poetry does not carry a lantern from house
to house,
If the poor do not know what it "means"
We had better discard it!
It is better that we seek immortal silence.
(" Of Poetry II
III
I would that these poems were
The chisel in the labourer's hand,
The bomb in the dissenter's palm-
I would that these words
Were the plough between a peasant's hands,
A shirt, a door, or a key!
Some say,
If my poems please those who love me
And anger my enemies
Then I am a poet .
As for me, I'll write--and go my way.
340
341
The Prison
The address of my house has changed,

The time of my meal
The amount of my tobacco has changed
The colour of my clothes, my face and my figure.
Even the moon,
Dear to me here
Is brighter and bigger.
The smell of the land is perfumed
The taste of nature is sweet
As though I stood on the roof of my old house
With a new star fixed in my sights
342
The Curtain Falls
When the applause dies in the theatre

And the shadows sway
Towards my chest,
The makeup falls from the face of Galilee
And therefore . I resign.
I find myself tonight

Naked
As a slaughterhouse,
My acting far from my father's songs
My acting strange to the birds of Galilee,
My arm like a fan
And therefore, I resign.
I was made to grasp what the producer wanted

I have danced to his lies
And
am tired now
I have hung my legends on a clothesline

I confess now to you that the play

Was written to amuse you
The critics are happy, but the eyes of the Magdalene
Have bored the shape of Galilee
... /
(" The Curtain Falls" )
343
Into my flesh
Oh, my blood .
Their brushes are sketching the Ludd desert
And you are the ink;
Jaffa is nothing but drurnskins
And my bones are sticks in the producer's hand
Yet I say:
My master, I shall perfect the role tomorrow
And therefore I resign.
Ladies-
Dear ladies-
Gentlemen!
I have entertained you for twenty years
It is time for me to leave,
Time to escape the crowd
And sing in Galilee
To the birds which live in an impossible nest
And therefore
I resign!
- by Mahrnud Darwish (1970)
344
Promises with the Storm
I will
If I must, hold death back
Burn off the tears of the bleeding songs
And strip from the olive trees
all unnatural branches.
If I sing for joy
Behind fearful eyelids
It is because the storm
Has promised me wine, new toasts
And rainbows,
And because it has swept
The voices of lazy birds
And borrowed branches
From the trunks of the straight trees.
I will, then,
Take pride in this wound of the city,
The canvas of lightning in our sad nights.
Though the street frowns in my face
It protects me from shadows and malign glances
So I sing for joy
Behind fearful eyelids.
When the storm struck in my country
It promised me wine, and rainbows
- Mahrnud Darwish
(1967)
345
Identity Card
Write down:
I am an Arab
My I.D. number, 50,000
My children, eight
and the ninth is due next summer
--Does that anger you?
Write down:
Arab
I work with my struggling friends in a quarry
And my children are eight
I chip a loaf of bread for them,
clothes and notebooks
from the rocks
I will not beg for a handout at your door
I will not humble myself
on your threshold
Write down:
Arab
A name with no friendly diminutive
A patient man, in a country
brimming with anger
My roots have gripped this soil
("Identity Card")
346
since time began,

before the opening of ages
before the cypress and the olive,
before the grasses flourished.
My father carne from a line of plowmen,
My grandfather was a peasant
He taught me about the glory of the sun
before he taught me how to read a book
My horne is a watchman's shack
made of reeds and sticks
--Does my condition anger you?
There is no gentle name,

Write down:
Arab
The colour of my hair, jet black
My eyes, brown
My trademarks,
a headband over a keffiyeh
and a hand rough as a rock
that scratches at the touch.
I am fond of olive oil and thyme.
My address is an obscure village
with nameless streets.
All its men in the field and quarry
talk of communism
... /
("Identity Card")
347
Write down:
Arab.
You have stolen my ancestors' vineyards
and the land I once ploughed
with my children.
You left my grandchildren
nothing but rocks
--Will your government take
those too, as the rumour goes?
Write down, then

at the top of Page One:
I do not hate
and I do not steal
But starve me, and I will eat
my assailant's flesh.
Beware of my hunger
and of my anger.
- By Mahmud Darwish (1964)
348
Samih al-Qasim
(1939
Born in Zarqa, Jordan, of Palestinian parents, Samih
al-Qasim grew up in Rama and Nazareth.
He has made the
decision to remain in Israel despite censure of his books

and periodic imprisonment for his activities as one of the
founding members of the primarily cultural movement, AI-Ard,
dedicated to the Palestinian cause.
Qasim is possibly the
only Arab-Israeli poet to have been drafted. into the Israeli

army.
He was forced to resign from hts teaching position
due to his evident political convictions, and until recently

pursued a journalistic career in HaIfa, as Mahmud Darwish did
in the 'sixties.
Like Darwish, he has travelled extensively
to give poetry readings in latter years.

AI-Qasim's poetry is experimental in form, consisting
of metrical free verse effectively varied in line length.
He has successfully integrated the Palestinian dialect into
his poetry in the form of internal monologue and dialogue.
It is the poetry of the cafe and the street, the village
and the house--and above all, the poetry of angry revolution,
which must sweep the Arab world to reinstate justice.
Some of al-Qasim's books of poetry are Aghani al-Durub
[Songs of the Roads] (1964), Dami 'ala Kaffi [My Blood is on
my Palm] (1967), Dukhan al-Barakin [The Smoke of Volcanoes]
(1968), Suqut al-AqniCa [The Falling of Masks] (1969), Fi Inti
zar Ta'ir al-Ra'd [Waiting for the Thunderbird] (1969),
Marathi Samih al-Qasim (Elegies of Samih al-Qasim] (1973),
and Jihhat al-Ruh (The Sides of the Spirit] (1984) .
349
Come, Together We Shall Draw a Rainbow
I have descended the stairs of sad defeat

Descended, with death alrr.ost at my heels
Screaming in the face of myoId grief,
Burn me, burn me so I may shine!
I have not been alone
And I have been alone in the darkness.
Kneeling, I would cry, and pray, and cleanse myself,
My forehead a piece of wax upon my arm,
My mouth, a broken flute;
My chest was a room
And hundreds of millions
Kneelers in my room:
They were blind eyes,
And the saint and the sinner were one
In the new wound
In the new shame
my country, tremble
And forgive me
Descending, with death at my heels;
Forgive me my anguished scream for this shameful kneeling;
Burn me, burn me so I may shine!
. . ./
350
("Come, Together We Shall Draw a Rainbow")
I was descending,
And grief was my only lifeline
The day I called from the far shore
The day I bandaged my forehead with a poem
From the pipes and the market of the slaves.
Who are you?
Are you a sister forgotten
By my mother in her bed, on the night of departure

And later sold to the wind and carried
Across the door of night to the great exile?
Who are you?
Answer mei answer me!
Which sister are you, among the thousands of prisoners
Who knew my face and called me lover,
Whom I took in my arms?
Close your eyes to the shame of the night
Close your eyes and weep, and hold me;
Let me drink your tears--let me.
My throat has dried in the wind of defeat
And as though we met after twenty years
As though we had never departed
As though we had never been burnt,

Love has taken us by the hand.
We talked of exile and the great prison,
Of our songs to the dawn to come
Of lifting darkness from the face of the country;
... /
("Come, Together We Shall Draw a Rainbow")
351
And we talked of the small hut
In the woods, on the mountaintop.
And vou shall give me a child

And we shall call her,
It
Ruin It
And you shall give me a bird and a jasmine

And a book of poems
You said to me -- remember -
" Why is your voice
So full of anger and grief?"
I said,
.. Oh my love, for the advance of the Tatars
And the defeat of the Arabs!"
You said to me,
"In what land did the wind cast you
So shamefully, twenty years ago?"
I said,
II
In the shade of your captured vines
And on the ruins of your towers where pigeons live!"
You said,
I said,
"In your voice there is pagan fire."
"Un.til the wind bears clouds!
They have made my wound an inkwell
And so I write my poems with a splinter of bone
And Ising for peace!"
... /
352
("~ome,
Together We Shall Draw a Rainbow ")
And we cried-
Like two strange children, we cried
The cooing pigeons that wait in cages
Cry, the cooing pigeons that return in cages
Cry .
Raise your eyes!
The grief of defeat
Is a cloud scattered when the wind blows

Raise your eyes, the merciful Mother
Still bears, and the world is wide
Raise your eyes
For twenty years
I have been drawing your eyes on the walls of my prison
And when darkness comes
Between your eyes and mine
On the walls of my prison
Appears your worshipped face
To my fancy:
I
cry,
and
sing.
We, my love, are from two valleys,

Each valley guarded by a ghost.
Come, let us make of our ghosts
Clouds for a rainbow to drink from!
... /
(" Come, Together We Shall Draw a Rainbow")

353
And I shall give you a child
And we shall call her,
It
Ruin"
And I shall give you a bird and a jasmine
And a book of poems!
- by Samih al-Qasim
(1969)
354
I Love You as Death Wishes
Heavier in weight
And shorter in figure,
I drag my temptation and walk on.
You are still the summit of the world;
The face of the earth is still curved.
I fall and flee, fall and flee-
One day the moving sand will catch me
Wading slowly, slowly in the infinity of your
darkened love
I will lose consciousness
And disappear from view.
The audiences will watch the ritual of my death
And the trail-blazers and poets will envy me.
But you will have a new pearl to throw in your
martyrs' box.
Have no regrets:
Do not lift your hand to rescue me.
Allow me to love you
As death wishes .
I love you
I love you . as death wishes!
- by Samih al-Qasim (1980)
355
Fear
The fire on the hearth will die down

The bottle will be emptied
The record will stop spinning
The guests will go their ways
We will prepare the bed together

And sleep together
You will wake up in the morning
And prepare the fine coffee;
The birds in your calm forest will sing my name.
You will call me . But shall I awake?
I fear death will surprise me in my sleep.
I will not sleep, then-

But stay awake until the friendly morning
And detect in your sleepy face

stars of our future world.
It is dawn.
I tuck the warmth of the blanket around you
And steal like a domestic cat
Lightly over the summit of the world.
Corne, prepare the coffee!
I move to your side,
... /
("Fear")
356
Kiss your sleeping palm
Calling:
Come, wake up
To the glad morning,
My reason for life Come, wake up!
.Without you, how can the sun set,
Or the sun rise?
- by Samih al-Qasim
(1980)
357
A Speech in the Unemployment Market
If you like, I will forfeit my wages

And put up my clothes and my bed for sale
I will work as a stonecutter, porter, or street-sweeper
And search for grain in the dung of cattle
I will languish, naked and hungry, first
But with you, Enemy of the Sun, I will not bargain
And with the last throb in my veins I will resist!
You may steal the last foot of my land

And feed my youth to the prison
You may seize my grandfather's inheritance
Of furniture, rags and dishes
You may burn my poems and my books
And throw my flesh to the dogs
You may dwell as a dream of horror over my village
You may smother my flame in the night,

Deny me my mother's kiss
And let children curse my kinfolk
In a heedless moment you may slip past the guardian
of my sorrows
And settle my history between a coward and a senseless god
You may refuse my children clothes for the holiday
. . ./
( " A Speech in the Unemployment Market ")

358
And fool my friends with a borrowed face
You may hedge me round with all your walls
And sacrifice my days on some humble site
Enemy of the Sun,
In the port there is feasting, and a flood of good tidings,
Shrills, and shouts, and a cry of joy;
Heroic anthems burst from every throat!
On the horizon, a boat
Challenges the wind and the boundless sea, and passes

out of danger:
It is Ulysses' return
From the lost seas-
The return of the sun, and of wandering man and woman-
And by her eyes, and by his eyes, I swear I will not bargain!
I will resist.
- by Samih al-Qasim
(1967)
359
So
As a palm tree is planted in the desert

As my mother plants a kiss on my frowning forehead
Or my father throws off his cloak
And spells for my brother the reading lesson
As a regiment casts off the helmet of war
As a stalk of wheat rises in the barren land
A star smiles on a lover
Or a breeze wipes the face of a straining labourer
As a factory towers over the clouds
As some of the Friends chant a prelude
As a stranger to a stranger smiles in sympathy
A bird returns to the beloved nest
And a student carries his schoolbag
As a desert knows fertility
So in my heart the Arab world beats.
- by Samih al-Qasim
(1967)
360
Descent
I emerge in the rain

I emerge in the blue lightning
In the breeze, in the hurricane
I emerge from a wound opened by a shell
in the heart of a wall
I emerge from the unquenched thirst of the wells
I emerge from an arch solid
in the face of the wind
From an almond plant erect
in the face of the fire
I emerge from the governor's signature
at the tail of a report
From the shadow of the policeman's billy club, I emerge
From a handkerchief that has only known tears
From the grass of the stolen land
From the hatred of burnt lips
From the onslaught of a sudden demonstration
From the throwing of bottles and stones
in the face of the blasting wind
I emerge from the anger of a friend
I have known since the time of sorrow
(" Descent" )
From your skin I emerge

From your fear I emerge
In what god after today will you seek refuge?
- by Samih a1-Qasim (1969)
361
362
The Eucharist of Failure
You fail to rescue me

From a useless and repeated death,
From the flames of this black whirlpool
In its river of ashes.
My veins are hoarse from their suicidal barking
And you choose not to hear-

Watch me, instead
In my funny, fearful hell.
How good it would be if you had tried
To bring me back
A wild flower, like love,
A growing grass blade in the execution wall,
A shadow in a labyrinth of dungeons and prisons.
You who know my voice, my arm, my forehead:
Discover me;
Discover me!
I have been lost an age in your burning dark.
Come out,
Ages hence, from my foolish doubts
And look for me.
When you are falling between the light and the darkness
Atonement of doubt, and mass of certitude!
I have come, uncalled, to you
(,I
363
The Eucharist of Failure")
A flame to which my veins have oozed

The purest oil.
You did not summon me alive
I have come, as you left me,
Neither living nor dead:
As you wish, take
Or desert me
And fall
A voice on the ruins of another voice
Fall
A house on the ruins of another house
And settle at the bottom of things
Treasure with immortal secret,
Doubt amid doubts
And forgive me,
Ruined moon,
Home for cedars and terrors
Forgive me
If the ink in the slender pen has dried
Let a bullet help:
he could not save you!
But this is how your singer chose salvation.
- by Samih al-Qasim
(1982)
[This poem was written after the suicide of the

Lebanese poet, Khalil Hawi, on June 6, 1982, two days
after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.J
364
Fadwa Tuqan
(1917
Born in Nablus, Palestine to a literary family, Fadwa
Tuqan completed her secondary education there.
could not attend university
Since she
she acquired more education
under the supervision of her brother, the poet Ibrahim Tuqan,

especially in the English language.
Tuqan was influenced
by the Koran and religious literature, by the classical Arab

poet al-Mut~abbi and by her brother's poetry.
1\
His death in
1941 inspired her to write a number of very fine elegies.

Tuqan's poetry has increasingly moved toward freer forms
although some is still traditional metrical verse.
It is
confessional poetry which often explores emotional paradoxes,

but is also concerned with themes of freedom and independence,
and the break with tradition.
As one of the leading female
poets in the Middle East, Tuqan deplores the suppression and

incarceration of women in her society.
Her experiences under
Israeli occupation since 1967 have prompted her to concen

trate equally on the theme of the Palestinian struggle, and
she has made a significant contribution to its poetry of
resistance.
Tuqan's publications include Wahdi mac al-Ayyam [Alone
with Days] (1955), Wajadtuha [I Have Found It] (1957),
ACtina
Hubban [Give Us Love] (1960), Amam al-Bab al-Mughlaq [Before

the Closed Door] (1967), and Al-Layl wa l-Fursan [Night and
the Knights] (1969) .
365
The Rock
Look how this black

rock has been fastened over my chest
with the chains of arrogant fate
with the chains of senseless time
Look, how it grinds beneath it
my fruit and my flowers,
Carves me with time
and crushes my breath.
Go! we can't overpower it.
The chains of my prison will hold.
I must stay
in isolation
while fate is my jailor.
Leave me
so: no light,
no tomorrow,
no hope
There is no escaping this black rock
There is no refuge
In vain I try to budge its weight from my chest

by forgetting myself-
How I roamed in
the heart of life
. ../
(" The Rock" )
and travelled in
every direction.
I played,
I sang
in the streams of youth
I held up my cup
and greedily drank
until I was absent to the world.
How the world of pleasure deceived me,
my pain and my misery in its lap!
I have escaped from
the world of my feelings
and danced, swift as the birds,
laughing in madness.
Then from
the depths of my pessimism

a call shook my spirit
and in secret it thundered on:
If
You will not escape,
I am here!
You will not escape. There is no refuge!"
The shadow of the black rock casts

deformed pictures.
In vain I try to budge it
366
(" The Rock" )
In vain I seek escape.

There is no refuge.
How I have probed the land of misery!

I smell the elixir of consolation
in the misery of prisoners like me,
prisoners of fate.
I came among the people
where tragedies are,
and tears
where the whips sizzle and fall
over the hordes,
over the naked backs
and the crushed necks
where the slaves
are tamed
and rush in groups
from every sunken place
crying
bleeding, sweating
I keep on:
I seek comfort
but there is no refuge

The curse of this black rock
was born with me
A constant trial
367
368
(" The Rock" )
Mute,
it follows me
Its shadow dogs my steps
Look how it has settled
in its arrogance
over my chest!
Go; we can't overpower it.
The chains of my prison will hold.
My spirit is
locked;
I am
alone in my struggle
alone
with pain
with time
with fate
alone
and this black rock grinding.
There is no refuge
- by Fadwa Tuqan
(1957)
369
'Izz aI-Din al-Manasira
A Palestinian poet and critic, Izz aI-Din al-Manasira

now divides his time travelling between
Jordan.
Cairo and
Amman,
His literary articles appear in Egyptian and Jorda
nian periodicals, and he often reviews books over the B.B.C.

Arabic Service broadcasts.
AI-Manasira's latest book of
poetry, AI-Khuruj min al-Bahr al-Mayyit [Exit from the Dead

Sea] (undated; ca 1980) expresses the anguish of exile,
often employing the language of love poetry symbolically
to convey the sense of loss felt by one expelled from his
homeland.
verse.
In poetic form, al-Manasira favours metrical free
370
Passport
To the city of pain;

pain, and sometimes Zove
I will leave you tomorrow, so listen to me and listen
To my last words.
Don't you see my pain-
Don't you see my sorrow?
For six years now I have lamented.
I am from before Noah's flood; I roam
Your deserts, I ask about
An oasis, or an island.
I will leave you tomorrow, so listen to me and to my
Last words:
In your green gardens I have palm trees and grapes
for wine,
I have kinfolk in your houses
And forgotten
tryst~
On your stone benches.
I have taken leave of young girls' eyes;
Long ago I deserted your nights;
I abandoned the treacherous times.
I have friends in your coffee shops--when drunk
.. ./
( "Passport fI
371
They are lords, and when sober
They recall their glory in the prisons.
In you I cursed; I hungered and I knew

My country.
I longed for the vineyard and the vine.
In you I conquered--and was defeated.
I saw the green moss eat your high walls.
I hate your silence, I hate your speech,
And I hate the eyes of your sleepersi
I hate your foolish lovesick drivers!
I will leave you tomorrow, so listen to me
and listen
To my last words:
For six years now I have lamented
I am from before Noah's flood
I roam your deserts
I ask about an oasis or
An island
- byCIzz aI-Din al-Manasira
(1980?)*
From an undated volume of poetry
372
MuCin Basisu
A Palestinian poet who left with the hundreds of thou

sands of Palestinians after the foundation of an Israeli
state, Mu~in Basisu still suffers the tragedy of his country.
His exile has intensified both his nationalism and the
u~i
versal dimension of his poetry, for he links the Palestinian

tragedy with the tragedies experienced by other nations,
denouncing colonizers both new and old.
Basisu draws effec
tive comparisons between historical figures and events and

those of the modern world.
Having adopted Egypt as his
second homeland, Basisu has become conscious that Arab

regionalism is a harmful and divisive force, and he advocates
the promotion of unity in the Arab world.
Basisu's volumes of poetry include Marid min al-Sanabil
[A Giant Among the Wheat Stalks], Al->Urdun Cala al-Salib
[Jordan on the Cross], AI-Ashjar Tamut Wagifah [The Trees
Die Standing] (1966), Filistin fi l-Qalb [Palestine is in the
Heart],)Il'an Ahfadak ya Jaddi [My Grandfather, Curse Your
Grandchildren] and Qasa'id 'ala Zujaj al-Nawafidh [Poems on
the Windowpanes] (1979), all of which appear in his Diwan
(1979) .
373
A Traffic Light
Red light, stop

Green light, go
Red
green
stop
go
Red light, red light

Where is the green light .. ?
A pregnant woman in a jalopy
Gave birth in a jalopy
The child grew up, fe11 in love, and was married
in the jalopy
He fathered children, read the world's magazines
and newspapers in the jalopy
They arrested him--imprisoned him in the trunk of
the jalopy
He enlisted and was killed under the windows
of the jalopy
They buried him beneath the wheels of the jalopy
And the jalopy was still in the street
Awaiting the green light
Awaiting the yellow light
Red light, stop
Green light, go
Red light
And green light
- by Mucin Basisu (1979)
374
To a Lady Tourist
Sorry, my lady, you came to us on a day
When the hands of the poets are being cut off.
What is for sale in the East?
We have sold to an old lady tourist before you
Salah aI-Din's tomb*
And the City of Hittin;
And we have sold the gardens of Babel, bud and flower
In markets allover the world.
We have sold the fingers and the rings.
Nothing remains but the pyramids
And the stones of the pyramids are so heavy!
Abu al-Hawl** is stabbed;
It will kill him to leave this land-

To have the knife pulled from his forehead.
Sorry, my lady, we have sold the last coffin,
We have thrown the last inkwell into the river,
And slain the last rooster that crowed.
*Salah aI-Din ibn-Ayyub (b. 1138), King and Sultan of the Fatimid
dynasty and great champion of Islam against the European Crusa
ders, is one of the most celebrated figures in Islamic history.
He was a chivalrous and enlightened ruler as well as a great
military leader. At the famous battle of Hittin (July 3-4, 1187
A.D.) he vanquished the Frankish army and soon afterwards recap
tured Jerusalem, then the capital of the Latin kingdom, thus
inciting Europe to gather its forces and launch upon a "third
Crusade" (1189-92).
**The Egyptian name for the famous sculpture of the Great Sphinx
at Al Jizah, which represents the incarnation of the Pharaoh
as the sun god, Ra.
("To a Lady Tourist")

375
Nothing remains now but God
Who runs like a green deer chased by hunting dogs,
Followed by galloping lies.
Yes, we will pursue, we will hunt God for you!
Those who sellout the poet, my lady,
Will sell God too.
- by Mucin Basisu (1979)
376
Sadiq al-Saligh
A Palestinian poet who calls Jerusalem his home, Sadiq

al- Sa'igh is a strong nationalist.
His poetry is particu
larly imaginative in its emotional appeal.
In his volume
of poems, Nashid al-Karkadan [The Rhinoceros' Song] (1971),

he condemns man's brutality to his fellow man and posits
a revolutionary end to the injustices experienced by
Palestinians and other refugees in the future.
Al-Sa'igh
makes effective use of non-metrical forms of free verse.
377
A Spectacle
Sir, the windows

Are blocked with mud
And the eaves of the minarets
Shake for the worshippers
Under the sun, time mends the garment of life
Blood is still on the walls
And death crouches behind the years
The unknown murderer is still monster of the night
And a man lies sprawled
In the cold on the asphalt
- by Sadiq al-SaJigh (1971)
378
Dryads
You sleep by my side

weeping for a summer
and a seaside, and a wonderful wound
You sleep by my side
on the shore of memory
Women spring out of us
steal our shirts,
and run to the forest
We vanish under a convolvulus

to watch the dusk fall
In darkness we see
women
strolling on the shore
calling
and playing on the moonlit bank
Come,
we are many balconies
we overlook the carnival of ages
Whenever the morning casts off its hours
a rose conceives, and shakes out
ribbons of light
- by Sadiq al-Sa~igh (1971)
379
Fingers of the Night

I
The heart has its tilted ships

and the airports of the spirit, their pillars of smoke
We sleep
and our fingers grow like pine trees in the night
II
Half the desert

is discoloured and mute,
and settles in the throats of the dead.
The martyrs own
armoured tanks and black sand
III
One day
we will fall asleep in our white clothes
But you will rise
to cover us
calling upon the dead,
upon the kingdom of the poor
Some day ..
It
All the ages have their dreams
and so does mine:

A poet from Rio
coming to Jerusalem
to write poems with bullets
and erase them
... /
(" Fingers of the Night I I
380
He will come
to lead the prisoners and the weary
along the paths of truth. "
IV
For a moment I thought of running to find
exile at the end of time-
A ball rising above the screams of the playground-
For a moment I thought of exiling myself
in your womb,
the womb of my native land.
I thought, and walked against the wind
I strode through your closed cities
I crossed fires, and roamed the seas
I travelled with the migrants,
I cried at the weeping wall
And always you shadowed me,
your illness on my mind,
the bullet holes in your forehead-
And sleeping on my arm, you cried:
Where do the winds go?
Where have the geese flown?
Sleeping on my arm, you cried:
I am dying, lonely and ragged.
Mark your borders and flee,
But leave me the borders of your ruins!
. . .!
(" Fingers of the Night" )
v
I measure the skies in my heart,
I measure the massacres with my tears
The earth grows away from me
The wind pulls away from me
while a voice sings in the distance,
11
Murderers!
Your bombs illumine me,

But the reaches of my spirit
are bounding flames."
- by Sadiq al-Sa'igh (1971)
381
382
Kamal Nasir
(1925-1973)
A Palestinian poet born in Birzayt, Kamal Nasir
received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the American Univer
sity of Beirut in 1945
and worked as a journalist for
various newspapers in Jordan after the partition of Pales

tine.
He was imprisoned many times by the Jordanian autho
rities for the explicit political content of his writing,

and after the Arab defeat of 1967 he joined the Palestinian
resistance.
Nasir's poetry is committed to documenting
+~~
struggle of the Palestinian_ people, not only in Israel but

in other Arab countries
where hostile governments subject
them to hardships and discrimination.
Like other Palesti
nian poetry, Nasir's is charged with emotion and pain; yet its
cultivated vocabulary and symbolic thrust distance it consi
derably from the direct and colloquial style favoured by
poets like Mahmud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim.
Nasir's collected poems were published in 1974 with an
extensive introduction by the Egyptian critic Ihsan (Abbas
under the title Al-Athar al-Shi(riyyah al-Kamilah li-Kamal
Nasir [The Complete Poetic Works of Kamal Nasir] (1974).
His
prose works were collected in Al-Athar al-Nathriyyah al

Kamilah li-Kamal Nasir and published in the same year, with
an introduction by Naji cAllush.
383
The Leaders of My Country
When I write the history of my country

with tears and ink,
I will weep over a page of confusion
oozing darkness
and a page wearied by nights of tattered mourning
and a page that exposes the secrets of corruption
and strips the struggling countries of deceit.
I will speak openly
to the perlexed millions in my country
about our leaders.

with candour and faith
I will weep for a black page oozing treason
that tells how slaves once contracted humility
and were humiliated
how thieves struck down the people and stepped on
its sceptre,
drank its free blood and lifted a cup of impotence
to its lips
and having debased it
questioned its existence.
A page of punishment drips from my pen-

a page that wrings blood from my heart.
- /
(" The Leaders of My Country" )
I will speak openly to the perplexed millions

about the leaders of my country
when I write our history.

in my youth, in my blood
I will weep over a page for the people
flooded with glory,
an immortal red page in the book of freedom
blazing with heroism, wasted in sacrifice and martyrdom
a page told in the light with righteous pride
about the struggle of the innocent
and the struggle of the honest
a page that stands firm in the enemy's assault
and beholds the splendid dreams of the heavens
I will speak openly
to the perplexed millions
about our leaders
when I write the history of my country
- by Kamal Nasir (1960)
384
385
Tawfiq Zayyad
A Palestinian poet who has lived and studied in the

Soviet Union, Tawfiq Zayyad is much interested in the
communist philosophy and way of life.
In his predominantly
political poetry he construes the causes behind successive

Arab defeats in the twentieth century.
Zayyad's free verse
is strongly metrical, and is marked by clarity of thought

and immediacy of message.
His Diwan appeared in 1970, a
collection of four volumes of poetry:
Shuyu'iyyun [Commu
nists], Idfunu Amwatakum Wanhadu [Bury Your Dead and Stand
QE), Ajid 'ala Aydikum [I Find on Your Hands], and 'Urn

Durman [Durrnan's Mother] .
386
Six Words
Before They Came
Before they came
roses sprouted on
my windowsill and blossomed
The vines reached up
and made a thousand stairways green
My house leaned and bathed
in the sun's rays
And I dreamt of bread
for all the people . I would dream.
But that was all before they came
on a blood-stained
tank
II
Snows on the Occupied Land
What murders
the secrets
in a struggling people?
Is there a war
... /
(" Six Words")
Play with fire as long as you like
Truth
will never
die
A Telephone Call
The first news from Tel-Aviv:
Dayan says (and Dayan is very cunning)
" We will always be sitting here,
and whoever needs us
will have to phone us"
The last news from Tel-Aviv
Ladies and gentlemen:
The chicken will never lay the egg
as long as
she wa a a . anders
VI
Salman
Said Salman to us
before a bomb buried him
in the yard of the big house:
My dears,
in the past we never were what we wished to be
and now we are
- by Tawfiq Zayyad (1970)
388
389
Tawfiq Sayigh
(1923-1971)
Born in southern Syria, Tawfiq Sayigh grew up in Tibe
rias, Palestine, where his parents moved while he was still
a baby.
His university education was acquired in a series
of universities, beginning in the Arab College in Jerusalem,

continuing at the American University of Beirut when his
family moved to Lebanon, and completed in England at Cam
bridge, Oxford and Harvard universities.
Sayigh has taught
Arabic literature at Cambridge and at London University, and

at the University of California at Berkeley during the final
years of his life.
More than any other Palestinian poet, Sayigh searches
beyond the topical and immediate experience to identify its
universal implications.
When homelessness or unrequited
love are his topics, pressing existential questions lie close

to the surface: it is man's spiritual bereavement and isola
tion that inform Sayigh's poetic vision.
He frequently draws
on Biblical images and literary genres (the parable, for

instance) in his examination of the modern psyche, yet his
poetry is never morally prescriptive.
It strives to reflect
reality but does not presume to change it through exhortation.

Non-metrical free verse lends itself well to sustained poetic
utterance, over which Sayigh has gained admirable control.
A kaleidoscopic series of arresting images enlarging upon a
common theme give urgency to Sayigh's poems.
390
Sayighrs volumes of poetry include Thalathun Qasida

[Thirty Poems] (1954), Al-Qasida K [The Poem KJ and Mucalla
gat Tawfig Sayigh [The Suspended Ode of Tawfig Sayigh] (1963)
His other literary activities include founding and editing
the magazine, Hiwar [Dialogue] while living in Beirut from
1962-1967, and translating an anthology of American poetry
entitled Khamsun Qasida min aI-Shier al-Amriki al-MuCasir
{Damascus, 1963} and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets as Ruba~iyyat
Arba c (Beirut, 1970).
391
Out of the Depths Have I Cried to Thee, 0 Death
Come closer, come closer

Young white mare,
Strong coquettish mare t
Come closer and neigh!
Your neighing is a tune, a hymn:
I heard it nine months before I was born
I
heard it singing to me in my cradle
heard it in the shrill songs of the dancers

on my wedding night
heard it in the church above the chanting chorus
heard it on my beloved's lips as the two sheets

wrapped us round.
Come closer,
And as I jump on your smooth back,
Kick the earth, and shriek against the sky.
Scatter dust and make the universe rumble,
And run
Run,
Climb mountains, cross valleys,
Race the wind, the birds, the light
And lovers' promises.
Run where you will:
Don't stop for red lights,
Don't ask the way;
.. ./
(" Out of the Depths .. ")
392
Run
Though a thousand spurs rake your sides
Run!
Do not head me off
To fields spread with dry plants

Sweeter than sugar in your mouth;
Do not head me off
To the festival of the sick
Or the troublesome swamp of old age,
Where flesh is mere flesh
And gargoyles usurp the pious niches;
Where She wears her foolish childhood
But not the dream, or the innocence;
Where men and women meet
And unite effortlessly;
Where loneliness is an illness
Exile, humility
And madness a deviation.
Do not head me off
To a field where you must be the first to venture-
Where other horses stumble

As they trail behind you one by one.
No,
would not love you as
do
Or choose you for my favourite mount

Were you the only one,
Were the stables empty but for you.
r would not love you
. . ./
(" Out of the Depths ..
n )
393
Had I dwelt in a swamp

Despising the world, without
Daring to spit upon it
Waiting
Empty-eyed in a vacant universe
Which you empty anew!
You would not be my favourite mount
If I had not passed over a thousand stables
Stocked with all manner of horses-
Red and blond, chestnut and black
Thouroughbred and crossbred
Racehorse and pack horse
Stable horse and jade,
Flawed and flawless horses-
Had I not passed all by
And run shouting to you:
You alone I love, you alone I will have!
Come closer,
Come closer:
The sentence has been passed
And I am bolted in my cell;
Come closer!
Waiting is worse than execution,
And the ruins of time are whips;
Come closer!
. .. /
(" Out of the Depths _ " )
394
You alone I love, you alone I will have

You alone know my refuge, my house, and my Eden.
Come closer
My saviour, my mentor, my help
My midwife and mother,
Come closer, closer!
I do not know your name
Your parentage, or your country
(You, who tamper with the aZay of a matahZess statue

And send the Zover's bones to the Zab!)
But I know of your beauty,

That your back is an open sesame
To the door of life
And I know that tonight I have a journey
That will break my father's heart
And bring me joy-
Like the journey that broke my heart
And brought my father joy_
Then carry me; run!
Do not head me off
To the well where you like to quench your thirst,
Where I promised to meet you;
Do not steer me
To the bloody fields
Where life is exchanged
For a medal, a leader's speech
(" Out of the Depths .. ")
And the newspapers' hubbub; do not take me

To fields where the stench of heroism,
nationalism and duty
Masks the spread of hatred
So that it pours
Only upon the enemy;
And do not take me to the unpatrolled
Fields of my blood
Where I have no ally
~he
fields of my blood! Mouths
That cannot drink enough

Of the blood from old men's dried veins,
Of
the
blood of girls who have known blood

only in the cheeks
And have not known it yet as a slow trickle;

Of the blood of fighting men
And the blood of doctors and nurses,
And of blood banks in hospitals
Types A, Band 0;
Of the blood of heroes that raius-dirty as a
bull's urine
And the blood of syphilitics that trickles
Filthily drop after drop;
Of my friends' and neighbours' blood,
Of my wife's blood
And that of the child on her arm, and another
395
(" Out of the Depths .
II )
396
unborn.
Fields of my blood-
Meadows that stink of an
All-encompassing hatred
Of those who are near, and those who are far,
Of those seen and unseen
Hatred of him and of her,
And of myself.
Run; run!
Fly without wings, vault the horizon
Flick the earth and the skies with your tail
Hunt the light and cast it up
Like a faithful Qarrad,
The tarrier on your back!
I will not ask
Where your hooves will alight
Where your path leads, where you will stay_
I see myself on your back,
Ruffling your forelock,
Listening to you neigh;
I see the world, necks bowing to you
All obliterated
As you run.
Do not head me off
To lofty terraces
... /
(,. Out of the Depths . ")
397
In a sleep-intoxicated garden,
To the Sundays of our weeks
To the evenings of our days;
To a crooked alley
That looks to all a familiar island on a map
And the naked rocks
They think are fertile soil.
Do not head me off
To a sleep-intoxicated garden
Where the stars are spying eyes
And the singing, hissing;
Where the flowers are all of paper and ribbon
Blurred reds, yellows, whites,
A drizzle of blood and vomit and death;
Do not head me off
To a garden thronged
With rings of dancers
Their arms and breasts
Mummified for centuries
And fixed upon bodies
That rotate them like machines
uttering their unintelligible prayers
In a strange language
To unknown gods
All dance, and uproar
. ../
(" Out of the Depths ..
II )
398
And machines:
Rehearsed rituals
The couple cracked by a shiver
A sacrificed innocence
Baptism of sin and knowledge
A nuptial tie that makes the two one
And the one zero,
A beautiful song that rises
Higher as you approach and neigh
To close off their festival and their ceremonies,
Running strong-backed and sure.
Run,
Run with me
o new Scheherazade
Who enthralls a Schahriah every night
And sucks him to ruin!
Run
o open womb
Damp with sweat
In which the genitals are limp and gelded.
Run with me
And I with you;
I have exhaZed your breath
And fixed my feet in your hooves
Together we pant
Leap and descend,
. ../
(It
Out of the Depths ..
It )
399
Together we roam the remote horizon

And the dew-washed grounds of pleasure.
Run with me,
It is lovelier to fall upon you
Than to fall upon my beloved's breasts;
I match the noisy rhythm of your movements
In their savage tune.
Move:
over you I am moving
And fiercer than my motion is my agony.
Run with me,
Our destination is one and the road is short;
Cross the last path with me,
And when agony throws you in the wide stable
It will throw me too,
Both of us
Tired, perfect, rested.
- by Tawfiq Sayigh
(Autumn 1960)
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Arab Poets].
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Complete Poetic Works].
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Birds Are Dying of Thirst].
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A1-Hubb La Yagif
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La [No].
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of the Depths Have I Cried to Thee, 0 Death"].
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Complete Poetic Works].
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ShuyuCiyun
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Adwa'
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Beirut:
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AI-Rumantiqiyah wa-Ma'alimuha fi aI-Shier al

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Farid, Mahir Shafiq.
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An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry 19451984 With A Critical Introduction

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AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN ARABIC POETRY

SELECTED AND TRANSLATED BY

JOHN MIKHAIL ASFOUR

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

John Mikhail Asfour, 1984

This study presents an Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry

A critical introduction was de

signed to provide the Western reader with a brief overview

The "new poetry" is discussed in terms of form,

the expansion of mythological interest which provided a com

Arabic poetic modernism have been examined with reference to

Cette etude presente une anthologie choisie de la

1984, traduite en anglais, et

regroupant des oeuvres de trente cinq poetes qui representent

critique offrira au lecteur occidental un survol des fac

La "poesie nouvelle" est commentee en termes

de forme, d' elaboration des interets mythologiques qui ont

modernisme arabe en poesie sont etudiees en rapport avec les

fois inspire et repousse les Arabes qui cherchaient un lan

For my parents, Mikhail and Milia Asfour

The Conception of the Present Study

Tradition in Arabic Poetry Before 1945

(a) The Nature of the Classical Arabic Poem

(b) The Need for Evolution in Poetic Conventions

(c) The Neoclassic and Romantic Poets

II. Free Verse--The Poetry of Taf'ilah

(b) Two Voices in Arabic Modernism:

III. The Tammuzi Poets:

Regeneration in the Wasteland

Ca) A Growing Interest in Foreign Mythologies

(b) Tammuz/Adonis Rediscovered: The Influence of

IV. The Political Poem and the Resistance Movement

NOTES ON THE INTRODUCTION

AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN ARABIC POETRY, 1945-1984

Selected and Translated by John Mikhail Asfour

I. The Free Verse Movement

"When I Killed My Love"

"Journey of the Yellow Letters"

'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati

"a traveller without luggage"

"Love in St. Lazare"

"The One-Eyed Liar"

* For ease of reference, the Biographical Notes have been

(I. The Free Verse Movement, can't)

"The Postman's Fear"

"An Arab Traveller in Space"

"Ice and Fire"

"The Dead Man"

"We Are Two Children"

Ahmad 'Abd al-MuCti Hijazi

"We Have Nothing"

"The Lonely Woman's Room"

"The Birds Are Dying of Thirst"

Bandar 'Abd aI-Hamid

"The Child That Was"

II. Tammuz Rediscovered

(a) The Five Major "Tammuzi" Poets

"Christ After Crucifixion"

"Song of the Rain"

From "The Book of Job"

Adonis ('Ali Ahmad Sacid)