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"Creswell, Robyn"
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City of beginnings : poetic modernism in Beirut
\"City of Beginnings is an exploration of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century. Robyn Creswell introduces English-language readers to a poetic movement that will be uncannily familiar--and unsettlingly strange. He also provides an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War, when Beirut became both a battleground for rival ideologies and the most vital artistic site in the Middle East. Arabic modernism was centered on the legendary magazine Shi'r (\"Poetry\"), which sought to put Arabic verse on \"the map of world literature.\" The Beiruti poets--Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, and Unsi al-Hajj chief among them--translated modernism into Arabic, redefining the very idea of poetry in that literary tradition. City of Beginnings includes analyses of the Arab modernists' creative encounters with Ezra Pound, Saint-John Perse, and Antonin Artaud, as well as their adaptations of classical literary forms. The book also reveals how the modernists translated concepts of liberal individualism, autonomy, and political freedom into a radical poetics that has shaped Arabic literary and intellectual debate to this day\"--Publisher's description.
Book
Poets in Prose
Novelists in many literary traditions have come to terms with the distinctiveness of their art form by thinking about poets and poetry. The need to differentiate the novel from poetry is especially pressing for Arab prose writers because of poetry’s preeminent status in that literary corpus. Many twentieth-century Arab intellectuals have valorized the novel as the representative genre of modernity – whether conceived as an absent ideal or the epoch of consumerist capitalism – while situating poetry as a backward element of contemporary life. But poetry has also offered prose writers such as Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, in A Period of Time, and novelists such as Tayeb Salih, in Season of Migration to the North, a way to reflect on the ambivalences engendered by modernity and the experience of colonialism. This tradition of using the novel to meditate on historical rupture and the fate of poetry continues into the present, even as poetry’s relation to political and intellectual life becomes increasingly tenuous.
Journal Article
Nazik al-Mala’ika and the Poetics of Pan-Arabism
\"Cholera\" was a watershed in Arabic literature. During the 1950s and '60s it served as a touchstone for poets across the Middle East, not so much for its content, which many readers found excessively sentimental, as for its technical innovations. Al-Mala'ika composed her poem in one of the sixteen classical Arabic meters, essentially unchanged since pre-Islamic times and codified in the eighth century, but she used a variable number of feet (taf'ila) per line, thereby dispensing with the uniform line lengths and hemistichal division of conventional verse. Rather than being formed into two even columns of text classical Arabic verse is often called columnar because of its shape on the page al-Mala'ika's poem was justified on the right margin and ragged on the left, a mirror image of the European poetry al-Mala'ika was sometimes accused of mimicking.
Journal Article
Crise de vers: Adonis’s Dīwān and the Institution of Modernism
This essay argues that Arabic poetic modernism offers a series of imaginary, or formal solutions to the crisis of modernity. The form focused on here is the \"diwan\", and specifically the monumental \"Anthology of Arabic Poetry\" edited by the Syrian modernist poet Adonis (b.1930) and published in 3 volumes in Beirut between 1964 and 1968. This work is seen as a complex, situated response to a historical crisis whose contradictions are crystallized in its various levels of argument and allegory. Adonis's anthology offers the elegiac pleasures of the poetic, now constructed as an autonomous institution. The interlocking parts of the project narrative, ideological and editorial combine to make the \"Diwan\" a remarkably integrated form of Arabic modernism, an artefact that illuminates its surrounding historical strata. (Quotes from original text)
Journal Article