![]() ![]() In contrast, one of the great joys of these verses is that Qabbani consciously relishes looking backward through the centuries and across a more extensive regional terrain, revivifying the clichés of classical Arabic love poetry. Indeed, it is through these ambivalent depictions of contemporary locales and the socioeconomic realities that they intimate that the poet fashions some of the most poignant portions of the poems. ![]() In the second poem, the narrator laments that he is unable to give a woman all that she dreams of because he is “A laborer from Damascus - poor,” who “soak morning loaf in blood/ hair in spit.” Wrapped up in the complications of love are the complexities of the poet’s relationship with these classed geographies, lending credence to Darwish’s point that Qabbani viewed the health of the nation and the free expression of sexuality as intertwined his humble Damascene roots are thus both a source of pride and anxiety during courtship, while his lurid portrayal of Beirut goes hand in hand with learning the art of sadness from a practiced, female teacher. In the first poem, we are told that his lover has taught him “how to see Beirut” (to which he migrated after ending his government career) as a harlot on promenade, bedecked with beautiful robes but also divulging pain. There is also a hope in these poems that the landscapes the poet has traversed - the cities and communities that he has had occasion to inhabit and speak on behalf of throughout his life - might meld with, accommodate, or elucidate his love for another human being. In the plain speech of the two poems presented in translation below (an “Ode to Sadness,” or, Qaṣīdat al-Ḥuzn, and “You Want,” or Turīdīna), one may detect a sort of plaintive hope laced with a countervailing, often tongue-in-cheek cynicism: there is a hope that the narrator can be enough for the woman he adulates, that his words can satisfy, and that she can fulfill him in turn. Much of the way in which Qabbani achieved this was by using the language of the everyday, stripped of pretense and elitism. In his obituary to the celebrated Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, published a few days after his death in May 1998, Adel Darwish writes that “for Qabbani, national liberation was meaningless without sexual liberation.” Qabbani, who had spent much of his life as a diplomat and ardent Arab nationalist, also spent much of his life as a romantic in more conventional terms, and through verse he brought his world and its muses into vivid, living color. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |