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Called "a major innovator in his art form" by The New York Times, Baghdad-born poet Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati broke with over fifteen centuries of Arabic poetic tradition to write in free verse and became world famous in the process. Love, Death, and Exile: Poems Translated from Arabic is a rare, bilingual facing-page edition in both the original Arabic text and a highly praised English translation by Bassam K. Frangieh, containing selections from eight of Al-Bayati's books of poetry.
Forced to spend much of his life in exile from his native Iraq, Al-Bayati created poetry that is not only revolutionary and political, but also steeped in mysticism and allusion, moving and full of longing. This collection is a superb introduction to Al-Bayati, Arabic language, and Arabic literature and culture as well.
On Al-Bayati's death in 1999, The New York Times obituary quoted him as saying once that his many years of absence from his homeland had been a "tormenting experience" that had great impact on his poetry. "I always dream at night that I am in Iraq and hear its heart beating and smell its fragrance carried by the wind, especially after midnight when it's quiet."
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
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
About the Author
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.
