Arabic Poems

by Everyman's Library

The Arabic poetic legacy is as vast as it is deep, spanning a period of fifteen centuries in regions from Morocco to Iraq. As a unifying principle, editor Marlé Hammond has selected eighty poems reflecting desire and longing of various kinds: for the beloved, for the divine, for the homeland, and for change and renewal. Poets include the legendary pre-Islamic warrior 'Antara Ibn Shaddad, medieval Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydun, the wandering poet Al-A’sha, and the influential Egyptian Romantic Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi. Here too are literary giants of the past century: Khalil Jibran, author of the bestselling The Prophet; popular Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani; Palestinian feminist Fadwa Tuqan; Mahmoud Darwish, bard of occupation and exile; acclaimed iconoclast Adonis, and more. In their evocations of heroism, nostalgia, mysticism, grief, and passion, the poems gathered here transcend the limitations of time and place.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2014

About the author

Everyman's Library is a series of reprints of classic literature, primarily from the Western canon.

The Library was conceived in 1905 by London publisher Joseph Malaby Dent, whose goal was to create a 1,000-volume library of world literature that was affordable for, and that appealed to, every kind of person, from students to the working classes to the cultural elite.

By 1910, 500 books had been published under the Everyman trademark, and in 1956, fulfilling Dent's original goal—the thousandth volume, Aristotle's Metaphysics, having been selected for the honour, was published.

Reviews

[Winnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.3/5.0

This is a temporary take because I already know I will reread it. I have not been living in poetry for a while, largely because poetry often seems to need extra scaffolding to work on me, a sense of the poet’s milieu, their preferred forms, their quarrels and affinities. An anthology in translation, with work spanning centuries and regions, cries out for an orienting introduction, and this one offers very little. I kept toggling between page and browser, piecing together lineages and contexts, and although that felt like labour the payoff was real. Once I had a rough map of who was speaking to whom, and why, the book opened.

With some context in place I let the poems flood in, and the experience was mostly gorgeous. I could even trace a few cadences in the Arabic here and there, which made the English feel less abstract and more like a companion rather than a replacement. The selection does good work centring women among the canonical voices, and those poems hit with a particular clarity, a kind of tensile strength that sharpened the whole set. I would have liked a touch more thematic breadth, since the curation leans hard into desire and its echoes, yet the range of tones is still rewarding, from laments to love lyrics to politically inflected meditations. As a journey through centuries of making and remaking the lyric subject, it repeatedly surprised me.

Technically, the translations read cleanly to my ear, with enough texture to suggest distinct sensibilities without overcompensating in modern idiom. The weakness sits around the poems rather than in them. Minimal notes, quick biographies, no timeline that could anchor a first pass through unfamiliar names. That lack slows approachability, because the anthology asks readers to supply the paratext it withholds. I also bounced off parts of the modern section. Free forms and rupturist gestures tend to leave me at sea, and that is probably my limitation rather than a fault of the book, but a few editorial breadcrumbs explaining the stakes of these breaks would have helped me hear the pulse.

Overall, this is a wonderful compilation, poorly introduced. I learned a lot, sometimes the hard way, and once I knew enough to stop fretting about frames I loved being in the poems’ weather. I will return to it with my own notes in hand, and I suspect the reread will be even richer. I recommend it to anyone happy to do some light scholarly foraging alongside pleasure reading, or willing to pair it with a quick primer on periods and forms.

Many thanks to V for the loving treat from lands far away.

[farah]

I didn’t have much faith going into this but sheesh it might be one of the worst translations I’ve ever read