Love, Death, and Exile
![]() 336 pp., 6 x 9 Paperback ISBN: 9781589010048 (1589010043) eBook ISBN: 9781647120771 E-Inspection Request E-Inspection January 2004 LC: 90-20394 EXPLORE THIS TITLE DescriptionTable of Contents Reviews |
Love, Death, and Exile
Poems Translated from Arabic
Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati, Bassam K. Frangieh, Translator
eTextbooks are now available through VitalSource.com! Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati is a world renowned poet whose career has spanned many decades. Born in Baghdad in 1926, he is known as the pioneer of the Arab free verse movement. his work is steeped in mysticism and allusion and its language is rich and subtle. Departing from classical forms in substance as well as in structure, he writes of the experience of alienation in the contemporary Arab city, of dreams of transcendent love, of nobility in death, and of the uncertainty, pain, and rootlessness of exile. This collection is the first English translation and the first bilingual edition of his work to be published in the United States.
Reviews
"[Frangieh] has constructed a beautiful and worthy portal for his powerful and accurate portrayal of Al-Bayati the poet through his own words. Al-Bayati's importance as a poet and a voice of modern Arab intellectual culture is successfully transmitted through the selection and translation. We observe his development as a poet, enjoying the development of particular messages, and his play with poetic form. . . . Al-Bayati and Frangieh have given us a most satisfactory read!"—MESA Bulletin "This fine publication will be welcome to specialists in the field and should be a revelation to a wider circle of poetry lovers."—Middle East Journal "In these elegant, passionate, and metaphorically inventive poems history intersects with contemporary life in ways that will surprise anyone interested in either literature or the Middle East. At turns haunting and inspiring, they give us a deeper present and a more informed future than we had before."—Cary Nelson, author of Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (Routledge) and editor of the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press) "Brilliant . . . This translation of such difficult, multimasked poetry is a real gem."—Sonallah Ibrahim, Egyptian novelist and essayist with photographer Jean-Pierre Ribiere of Cairo from Edge to Edge "'The night overtook the day,' and Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati overtakes the reader with his deeply somber and vivid poems that never cease to ask: 'why did the nightingale of love fly away. . .why do we cry. . .what did the song say?' The work in this collection is carved with light and darkness, taking us to the cracks of a nation, where 'in the coffeehouse of the East [they] were defeated by the war of words' to the pulse of exile, where 'no one knows another,' were killed 'before [they] loved each other.' Bayati tells us that in exile we encounter death, in this death we find life, and love carries us through it all. For the poet, exile like love and death is a prison and an infinity. Bassam K. Frangieh's translation renders the passion of these poems beautifully, and we know now, when 'the poet departed. . .his footsteps drew the map of things,' and we are forever led 'blind into exile: eye of the sun.'"—Nathalie Handal, author of The Never Field and editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology5 "Faithful and sensitive. An added attraction to this excellent performance is the printing of the Arabic text facing the English translation."—Irfan Shahid , Sultanate of Oman Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, Georgetown University, andauthor of Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century "A new learning resource for students of Arabic literature on an important figure in modern Arab culture."—Ibrahim Ibrahim, professor of contemporary Arab studies Table of Contents Preface Foreword Introduction The Eyes of the Dead Dogs (1969) The City Lament for the June Sun Something About Happiness Writing on Clay (1970) The Magus The Nightmare of Night and Day Elegy to the Unborn City Three Watercolors Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World (1971) Eye of the Sun About Waddah of Yemen&—Love and Death Love Poems at the Seven Gates of the World Aisha's Mad Lover The Book of the Sea (1973) Metaporphoses of Netrocres in the Book of the Dead The Princess and the Gypsy The Lady of the Seven Moons The Lover Autobiography of the Thief of Fire (1974) Labor Pains Poems on Separation and Death The Earthquake The Gypsy Symphony Shiraz's Moon (1975) For Rafael Alberti Reading From The Book Of Al-Tawasin By Al-Hallaj Death and the Lamp Portrait of the Lover of the Great Bear The Greek Poem I Am Born and Burn in My Love Shiraz's Moon Love Under the Rain The Kingdom of Grain (1979) Light Comes From Granada First Symphony of the Fifth Dimension Variations On The Suffering Of Farid Al-Din Al-Attar I Shall Reveal My Love For You to the Wind and the Trees Aisha's Orchard (1989) Elegy to Khalil Hawi From the Papers of Aisha Another Paper The Fire of Poetry False Critics The Birth in Unborn Cities The Blind Singer A Smoke Dancer The Birth Aisha's Orchard Aisha's Profile The Deceiver The Face The Great Wall of China A Woman Al-Basra The Unknown Man The Peacock The Poem A Man and A Woman A Profile of a City Secret of Fire A Conversation of a Stone Glossary |