Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict

by Waed Athamneh

In Modern Arabic Poetry , Waed Athamneh addresses enduring questions raised from the 1950s to the present as she investigates the impact of past and contemporary Middle Eastern politics on its poetry. Focusing on the works of three prominent poets, Iraqi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (1926–1999), Egyptian Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī Ḥijāzī (b. 1935), and Palestinian Maḥmūd Darwīsh (1941–2008), Athamneh argues that political changes in the modern Arab world―including the 1967 war and the fall of Nasserism, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, in Ḥijāzī's case, the 2011 Arab Uprising and its aftermath―inspired transitions and new directions in these poets' works. Enhanced by Athamneh's original translations of a number of the Arabic texts discussed, as well as translations published previously, Modern Arabic Poetry brings these poets fully into the purview of contemporary literary, political, and critical discourse. It argues that their individual responses to political changes proceed in three distinct the metapoetic, in which the poet disengages from the poetry of political commitment to find inspiration in artistic (self-)exploration; the recommitted, in which new political revolutions inspire the poet to resume writing and publishing poetry; and the humanist, in which the poet comes to terms of coexistence with permanent or unresolved conflict.

324 pages, Hardcover

Published March 30, 2017

Reviews

[Tatyana · Rating 4 out of 5]

"She’s alone in the evening
and I am alone like her …
Between her candles and me in the winter restaurant
are two vacant tables (nothing disturbs our silence).
She doesn’t see me, when I see her
picking a rose from her chest,
and I also don’t see her, when she sees me
sipping from my wine a kiss …"
- Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), from “She, in the Evening”


"O pain of love,
Wake up. I extended my hand to you and begged you,
But you filled my darkness with a flash of lightning."
- al-Bayātī (1926-1999), from “Meditations on the Other Face of Love”

"I am a bow between your hands, so break me,
and I am the lover and the beloved
So, leave me. How evil this love is. It is nameless and
it has all the names"
- al-Bayātī (1926-1999), from “The Blood of the Poet”

"With the blood of the poet
This cruel love writes the history of the soul."
- al-Bayātī (1926-1999), from “The Blood of the Poet”