Nizar Kabbani from the book Arabian Love Poems. Used with permission of Lynne Rienner Publishers...

From Arabian Love Poems by Nizar Kabbani, translated by Bassam K. Frangieh and Clementina R. Brown. Copyright (c) 1999 by Bassam K. Frangieh and Clementina R. Brown. Used with permission of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Order the Book

About the Book

NIZAR KABBANI’S POETRY HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS “MORE POWERFUL than all the Arab regimes put together” (Lebanese Daily Star). Arabian Love Poems is the first English-language collection of his work. Frangieh and Brown’s elegant translations are accompanied by the striking Arabic texts of the poems, penned by Kabbani himself especially for this collection.

Kabbani was a poet of great simplicity—direct, spontaneous, musical, using the language of everyday life. He was a ceaseless campaigner for women’s rights, and his verses praise the beauty of the female body, and of love. He was an Arab nationalist, yet he criticized Arab dictators and the lack of freedom in the Arab world. He was the poet of Damascus: “I am the Damascene. If you dissect my body, grapes and apples will come out of it. If you open my veins with your knife, you will hear in my blood the voices of those who have departed.”

NIZAR KABBANI was born in Syria in 1923, to a traditional, well-to-do family. He served in Syria’s diplomatic corps for more than 20 years (1945-1966), but settled for political reasons in London. He died on April 30, 1998; at his request, he was buried in Damascus.

BASSAM K. FRANGIEH is Professor of Arabic at Yale University. CLEMENTINA R. BROWN translates and interprets from Arabic, French, and Spanish into English.

The following was copied verbatim from the book titled NIZAR KABBANI ARABIAN LOVE POEMS, Full Arabic and English Texts, Translations by Bassam K. Frangieh & Clementina R. Brown, published in Colorado, the U.S.A. in 1999 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. (telephone 303-444-6684). This is a new edition of the first translations published in 1993.

Preface

ON APRIL 30, 1998, NIZAR KABBANI, THE MOST POPULAR ARAB poet of the twentieth century, died at age 75 in London. The battle for his life, waged against complications resulting from several heart attacks, lasted four months. Syrian president Hafez Al-Assad, who had just two months earlier decided to name a major street after Kabbani in Abu Roummana, the most prestigious district in Damascus, dispatched his own plane to carry Kabbani’s body back to the city of his birth. Kabbani had asked in his will to be buried in his native land: “I want my body to be transported after my death to Damascus to be buried there with my people.” Kabbani continued in his will, “ Damascus is the womb that taught me poetry, creativity and the alphabet of Jasmine. I want to return home like the bird returns home and like the baby returns to his mother’s bosom.”

Kabbani, a devoted and committed Arab nationalist, was “hailed across Syria as a national hero,” wrote the New York Times on the day following his death.(1) Al-Assad sent a member of his cabinet to extend his personal condolences to the family, and Kabbani’s coffin was draped with the Syrian flag in one of the largest funeral services in the country’s history. On the afternoon of a torrid May 4, a massive number of people crammed into the street in front of Badr Mosque, where the poet’s funeral took place. The newspaper Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat estimated that more than ten thousand people walked in the three-hour funeral procession to Bab al-Shaghour, where the poet was laid to rest next to his father, mother, sister, and son. (2) The mourners included the minister of defense, the governor of Damascus, other high-level government officials, Syrian Ba’thist leaders, Arab writers, members of influential organizations, unionists, artists, and journalists. Traditionally, Syrian women have not participated in such large public processions. Still, a large number of women attended the funeral—women who had been deeply touched over the years by Kabbani’s verses, which spoke directly to them, about them, and for them.

Outside of his native Syria, the poet was mourned by millions of Arabs all over the world. Major newspapers reported on the loss: The London Times described Kabbani as “the Arab World’s greatest love poet in modern times,”(3) while the Washington Post called him “the master of the love verse.”(4) The New York Times obituary quoted a Syrian poet who said that Kabbani has been “as necessary to our lives as air.”(5) Most radio and television stations in the Arab world interrupted their regular programs to announce the sad news of Kabbani’s death. Virtually every Arabic-language newspaper carried extensive front-page coverage of his death, with additional articles on his life and achievements. For weeks, not a day passed without a major commentary in the Arabic press detailing his significance to Arab society.

Leading Arab intellectuals expressed great sorrow at the vacuum Kabbani left in Arabic poetry and culture. Poet Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati, a pioneer in the free-verse movement that swept the Arab world in the 1950s, said: “The poetry of Nizar Kabbani has been a mirror of an entire age and served as a history for Arab aspirations and hopes that were crushed after the June 1967 Arab defeat. He stood alone in his poetic style and diction with a unique texture. The many poets who tried to imitate him have all failed.”(6) Lebanese critic and professor Muhammed Najm, who recently edited a two-volume set of literary criticism in honor of Kabbani’s work, reflected that “no Arab poet has surpassed Kabbani in either originality or innovation. Once he fully mastered classical Arabic poetry, he moved on to modern Western literature, then produced profound poems with extreme simplicity.”(7)

Novelist Tayeb Salih commented that “an Arab World without Nizar Kabbani is very difficult to imagine. Kabbani devoted his life to the Arab World for fifty years, engaging himself in all social situations, in all victories and defeats, in our sadness and joy, and he stood at the heart of all Arab events, always defying and provoking, encouraging and satirizing. Events got their full meanings only when he described them. Victories were not considered victories until Kabbani said that there were victories, and the dimensions of defeats were not clearly understood until Kabbani pointed them out.” It is as if, Salih added in his Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat piece, “lovers did not learn the meaning of love until they read the poetry of Nizar Kabbani.”(8)

To say that Kabbani was the most popular and famous of contemporary Arab poets is not to claim that he was the most skilled. Others far surpassed him in vision and sophistication; but their complex verses, charged with metaphysics and metaphor, were accessible only to the intellectuals and the highly educated. Kabbani’s verses addressed the crises facing the people: the realities of high unemployment, the challenge of earning enough to bring home bread and rice to one’s family, the interrogations and investigations made by the police and secret service against innocent citizens, the series of dictators and their political mafias in the years since independence. Kabbani wrote in a language that was close to the language spoken in the home and in the street. He used images close to the heart, with a mystical, penetrating musicality that altered Arab political consciousness. As a result, his poems were read in cafes, in parks, in office buildings, and on street corners. His was a strong voice for the millions of oppressed Arabs who would not talk for fear of political or social persecution. He will always be remembered as the poet who was more politically effective than any modern Arab political party. His poetry was described as “more powerful than all the Arab regimes put together.”(9)

Readers will also surely miss Kabbani’s prose. He was a writer sought by the most influential newspapers and magazines in the Arab world, and his columns gained readers for any paper lucky enough to publish them. People anxiously awaited his boldly provocative criticisms of the most recent political developments in the Middle East. He was always on top of current events. Always rebellious. Always dissatisfied. Always loud and confrontational. The masses saw in his words a compass amid the chaos of Arab reality and its unclear future direction. Kabbani was a mainstream leader who called for resistance and radicalism in the shadow of a failed Middle East peace process and a stagnant Arab culture, refusing to accept either. Along with a number of other nationalist writers, he opposed normalization with Israel. He openly battled Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner for literature, who supported normalization.

Kabbani was unique: Although he attacked rulers, he was never thrown in jail. Although his books were banned in some Arab countries, he remained the world’s best-selling Arab poet. Although he addressed his verses to the poor and the oppressed, he never associated with them, unlike other poets such as Al-Bayati, who spent time in cafes and public places, drinking coffee with ordinary people, listening to their problems, and offering advice. Kabbani never dropped a bourgeois mentality and an elitist attitude.

(This last comment is not intended as criticism. The Syrian bourgeois class during the French mandate and in the 1940s, when Kabbani was in his formative years, was divided for the most part into two groups. The first group “sold out,” serving as local agents for the imperialists, imitating the French, visiting casinos, dancing the tango, and spending their summers in Paris. The second group, which included the Kabbani family, was the “nationalist” bourgeois: They played a major role in provoking the people to struggle against the French mandate and in developing a national political consciousness; they also served as arms brokers both to finance the nationalist movement and to supply the members of the resistance with weapons for fighting against the French occupation. Kabbani’s father was one of the national bourgeois who helped to finance and organize the Syrian National Movement).

There is no Arab poet of equal caliber to Kabbani on the near horizon. He remains a powerful psychological outlet for millions who express their misery and pain through his verses. Those verses have been a necessity of life to many Arabs, from Morocco to the Gulf. Thus, in lamenting his death, Sulhi Al-Wadi wrote: “Kabbani is like water, bread, and the sun in every Arab heart and house. In his poetry the harmony of the heart, and in his blood the melody of love. His body has departed, but his soul is hovering over the Damascus to which he bid farewell with jasmine to be received with laurels. . . .Good-bye Nizar.”(10)

Lynne Rienner called me in Cairo in May 1998 to express her interest in publishing a new edition of Nizar Kabbani’s Arabian Love Poems, which I had translated with Clementina Brown in 1993. That call came at a time when I was both saddened by the poet’s recent death and disappointed at the unavailability of the love poems, the Arabic text of which Kabbani had written in his own hand.

In the weeks following the poet’s death, I read a daily deluge of obituaries and articles on his life and achievements. The more I read, the more I realized that no gesture of appreciation could equal ensuring the availability of his poetry. This new, revised edition of Arabian Love Poems, particularly meaningful so soon after Kabbani’s death, is offered as a sincere appreciation of the elegance of Arabic poetry, and as a way to keep Kabbani’s legacy alive in the English-speaking world.

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Bassam K. Frangieh

(1)New York Times, May 1, 1998
(2)Ash-Ashrq Al-Awsat, May 5, 1998
(3)London Times, May 14, 1998
(4)Washington Post, May 1, 1998
(5)New York Times, May 1, 1998
(6)Ash-Ashrq Al-Awsat, May 1, 1998
(7) Ibid.
(8) Ibid.
(9)Lebanese Daily Star, May 5, 1998
(10)Tishreen, May 2, 1998