The Blue Rose at Twilight: On Modern Arabic Verse

By Samir Al-Sheikh

The Blue Rose at Twilight is a mongraph to explore the Arabic Verse in its modern trends.It intends to invetigate the modern poetic experiences as represented by five major poets: Nizar Kabbani( Syria), Unsi al-Haj ( Lebanon), Yasin T. Hafiz ( Iraq), Mahmoud Darwish ( palestine), and Ali J. al- Allaq ( Iraq). Being a universal phenomenon, the poetic image in these experiments is approached by the so-called Aesthetic-cultural Approach, a crtical means that links the cultural patterns of meaning to the aesthetic structure of the poem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467885836

Samir Al-Sheikh

SAMIR AL-SHEIKH( critic, poet, translator) is Assist. Prof. of poetry at the University of Misan, Iraq. He is the author of the published books: The watery Poems , Stylistic Studies in Nizar Kabbani's Poetry(2008), Culture and Transaltion: Papers on Transaltion(2010), Roses and Ashes( poetic volume)(2010) and Transformations of the Sunflower: On Poetic Discourse(2011).Additionally, Al-Sheikh is the head of English Department, College of Efucation, and a Student Advisor for the Iraqi students who intend to study at U.S. universities. He participeted in the International Visitor Leadership Program in the U.S. in 2009.

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© 2012 by SAMIR AL-SHEIKH. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 01/16/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8582-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8583-6 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Introduction

1 Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998)

The Rose in Bed

2 Unsi Al-Haj (b. 1937)

The Surrealist Mapping of Love

3 Yasin T. Hafiz (b. 1938)

The Solitary Spirit

4 Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008)

Innana Wears the Sonnet

Ali J. al-Allaq (b. 1945)

Crystal Mirrors of Wilderness

Notes

Further Reading

A poem should not mean

But be.

ARCHIBALD MAC LEISH

Ars Poetica

TO

LOVE, BEAUTY, AND LIBERTY

Introduction

The Blue Rose at Twilight, being a title, is likely to suggest that in spite of the crisis of the world, the world of tragic wars, violence and atrocity, there still blooms poetry as the eternal destiny of mankind. All the world nations sail on one Arc, i.e., humanity, and poetry remains its everlasting shared star. Art, in general, and poetry in specific, is the rosy urn by and through which we keep our aesthetic-cultural sensibility to improve our species as humans. Poetry, moreover, is essential as par excellence of the linguistic network. The human value of art springs from the aesthetic demand when demand itself becomes a matter of cultural experience. Culture and Aesthetics, in our perception, are inseparable. They are two facets of one phenomenon, i.e. universal truth. Poetry, nevertheless, is not a still-painting on the wall. Rather, it is an ever-changing phenomenon since it is the output of the aesthetic and spiritual human experience. The Blue Rose at Twilight, then, is an attempt to explore the Arabic verse in its modern traits. It intends to investigate the modern poetic experiments as represented by five major poets: Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998/Syria), Unsi al-Haj (b. 1937/ Lebanon), Yasin T. Hafiz (b. 1934/ Iraq), Mahmoud Darwish(1942-2008/ Palestine), and Ali J. Al-Allaq (b. 1945/ Iraq). The book, in its prime outline, is neither a concise guide to modern Arabic poetry nor theorization about poetic creation. In reality, it craves for the poetic image as an aesthetic-cultural variation, and culture is but one aspect of that poetic transfer. Being a universal phenomenon, the poetic image is approached by the so-called Aesthetic Cultural Approach ( ACA), a critical means that links the cultural patterns of meaning to the aesthetic structures of the poem. The text—linguistic approaches have trodden the path of poetic text but have failed to glow its cultural aspects, whereas the cultural approaches view the text as a cultural event without paying much attention to its linguistics, since literature is prerogative of language. The merit of our approach, we speculate, is to kindle the aesthetic-cultural values of poetic discourse. But before going a step further, it is of interest to shine light on the two fundamental pillars of the approach. i.e. Aesthetics and Culture.

Aesthetics originally refers to the theory of beauty and the imitation theory of art. In one sense, the term is concerned with the focus upon the process of creation in the artist / maker and of appreciation in the listener/reader. Aesthetics, in this respect, construes a psychological dimension which is not within the scope of the book. What matters to the approach is the aesthetic value of art which gives the reader the aesthetic pleasure by appealing to the power of imagination. One more sense to Aesthetics is distortion. Aesthetics, in terms of modern literary theory, refers to the intentional violation of the linguistic norms. This deliberate distortion is not without function. Mukarovsky, a Prague linguist and anesthetist, elaborates on the aesthetic aspect of verse by arguing that the standard language is the background against which is reflected the esthetically intentional distortion of the linguistic components of the work, in other words, the intentional violation of the norm of the standard.(1) This distortion; however, does not occur at random. Rather, it is a systematic violation and that what makes possible the poetic utilization of language; without this possibility there would be no poetry (.(2)The Prague linguist; moreover, accentuates the aesthetic valuation in the arts maintaining that the esthetic valuation necessarily stands highest in the hierarchy of the values contained in the work, whereas outside of art its position vacillates and is usually subordinate. He concedes to say that in the arts we evaluate each component in terms of the structure of the work in question, and the yardstick is in each individual case determined by the function of the components within the structure.(3) Mukarovsky, in this respect, lays emphasis on the aesthetic function of verse which is crucially imaginative.

The other aspect of the approach is Culture. Culture is viewed differently within different paradigms. The body of moral and intellectual values produced by the wits in the disciplines of literature, epistemology and arts throughout centuries is thought to be Culture. Related to Aesthetics, Culture is imaged as the corpus of beliefs, behaviors and ways of thinking. Of these ways are philosophy, literature and arts. Newmark defines the term as the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expression (4). Not only that, but even the natural and social surroundings of the speaker are a seminal part of his/her culture. Such elucidations may cope with the tempo of the approach in dealing with the poets’ artifacts as units of meaning, and as unique aesthetic-cultural manuscripts.

The book, in its sub-title, refers to modern verse, more specifically, modern Arabic verse. Modern verse simply means modern life in words; the one that penetrates the complexity of human nature, manifests the cares and joys of man, and denotes the vicissitudes of the world situations. The task of the poet is to portray the discordant rhythm of the age. This is true to the poetry of all nations and the modern Arabic verse is not an exception. A close reading of the Arabic verse in its par excellent modes reveals two patterns of poetic thinking, the intuitional and the intellectual. Influenced partly by Western anesthetists like Kant, Croce’ and the Romantic axioms, the intuitional trend tends to be lyrical in tone, spontaneous in imagery and simple in structure. The trend, in a way, brings verse to the brink of ordinary everyday language. Qabbani (1923-1998), the Syrian poet, is the exponent of the current. The intellectual mode, on the other hand, is the one which is philosophical in thinking, oblique in imagery and complex in semantic-syntactic kernels. The amalgam of Arabic—Islamic sophism and Western rational philosophy are evidently realized in such poetics. Adunis (b.1929), the Syrian poet, represents the intellectual current in modern poetry. A textual comparison between Adunis and Qabbani may reveal the stylistic variations between the two poets from the formal standpoints. Adunis’ A Grave for New York reads:

poem1.pdf

Until now the earth has been drawn in the shape of a pear

I mean a breast

But between the breast and the tombstone there is only a difference

of geometry:

New York

Is a four–legged civilization; in each direction murder and

A road leading to murder

And in the distances is the moaning of the drowned. (5)

Let us consider first the use of the scientific use of geometry in the poetic extract which recalls to the mind Donne’s conceits. The imagery is concrete in nature. Let us consider, moreover, the rational use of the breast which occurs twice in the lines of verse. The diction is structured in more complex clauses where the adverb of time precedes the subject in the first line, whereas the expression between the breast and the tombstone is moved and conjoined by the coordinator but. The complexity of the syntactic units may decrease the tone of euphony that could be found in Qabbani:

poem2.pdf

Give me the time to catch

The colt that runs towards me,

Your breast.

The dot over a line.

A Bedouin breast, sweet

as cardamom seeds

as coffee brewing over embers,

Its from ancient as Damascus brass

As Egyptian temples. (6)

In Qabbani, one may recognize the spontaneous overflow of imagery. The image of the beauty of the breast is sensuously constructed by a series of similes. By and through the power of simile, the breast is imaged in different mirrors. The short clauses give the chance for musicality to flow smoothly. So, in the extract we witness an extended simile that serves to paint the feminine element of beauty in words. Poetically, while Qabbani’s images are the powerful manifestations of his emotions, Adunis stands in an intellectual relationship to his imagery

Between these two poles swing certain experimentations, such as that of Darwish. Lyricism is still is the hallmark of both poetic currents. However, man in his ecstasy and melancholy is still central to the poetic experience. The modern verse, as an odyssey of meaningful creativity, arises certain difficulties to the reader’s awareness. Of these difficulties is the cross-cultural patterns and the ontological allusions that modern poets have recourse to to express their ideas, feelings and aspirations.

In the Arab Land the modern modes of imaginative expressivity have emerged, first, as an aesthetic need and secondly as a dramatic reaction to the conventionalism of the old poetic form. Human aesthetic awareness has developed due to complex factors. The socio-cultural and political factors are of the most revealing ones. Technically, the traditional two-hemistch form of al-Mu’alakat (the Suspended Poem) with its mono-rhymed scheme, worn-out diction and cliché imagery (the cheeks are compared to roses and the teeth are compared to lilies) failed to absorb the ever changeable world of the present. The poet, therefore, needs to