REVIEWS KABBANI, NIZAR, Arabian Love Poems
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REVIEWS KABBANI,NIZAR, Arabian Love Poems: Full Arabic and English Texts. Trans- lated by Bassam Frangieh and Clementina R. Brown. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers; 1999. Table of contents, preface, introduction, selected poems and their translations. Pp. xiii + 225. Nizar Qabbani requires no introduction to any serious student of contemporary Arab culture. His remarkable popularity as a poet throughout the Arab world has spanned decades, just as his poetic output reached fifty volumes of poetry (1). The fact, then, that this volume, which first appeared in 1993, was and is the first book-length work of translations of his selected poems into English took this reader by surprise. The preface of this second edition indicates that Nizar Qabbani's death in April 1998 occasioned the revision and reissuing of the volume. Bassam Frangieh and Clemen- tina Brown have done us all a great service by collaborating to create this bilingual volume directed primarily at the English reading audience. The poetic texts are pre- sented in parallel English/Arabic versions on facing pages, with the more enviable feature that the Arabic is a reproduction of the poet's own handwritten text of the selected poems, indicating the collaboration of the poet in the project as well. Bassam Frangieh's generous introduction places Qabbani's poetic production in the context of the poet's life and the larger framework of events in the twentieth- century Middle East. The information on Qabbani's family and personal history are helpful suggestions for what may have contributed to his poetic development. Frangieh cites several of Qabbani's most important poems as markers of this poetic development, in order to point to his important role in Arabic intellectual culture in all its political and social aspects. The introduction teases us with references to Qabbani's political poetry, most markedly his "Bread, Hashshish, and the Moon," and "Marginal Notes on the Book of Defeat," making this reader wish for a much broader and more ambitious representation in English of the sweep of Qabbani's works. The hints at poetic critique in response to political realities in Qabbani's broader corpus are brought back to the issues of intimacy treated in the volume's selected poems through Frangieh's mention of Qabbani's poetic response to the mur- der/death of his wife in Beirut in 1981 during the Lebanese Civil War, in his poem entitled "Balqis." The introduction is well adorned with footnotes citing published versions of Arabic source texts. This reader, however, would have appreciated as well references to what published English translations exist of the cited poems. Turning to the main theme of the selections, Frangieh comments at some length on Qabbani's treatment of the intersecting themes of women, love, sex, relationships and society due to his specific selection in this volume from Qabbani's love poetry. A more detailed and delicate biographical treatment, which would place the poetic production represented in the volume in the context of specific relationships, has been left as a task for the biographer, and has not been assayed. While acknowl- edging in passing the multiplicity of relationships documented in these poems (9), 255 Bassam Frangieh has maintained the anonymity of the woman/women to or of whom these poems speak, preferring to focus on the universalist aspects of this poetry of intimacy. Frangieh's encomiastic presentation offers an interesting problematic for this reader, however, when measured against the love poetry the volume contains. Frangieh asserts numerous times in the introduction that Qabbani championed women's rights and women's liberation, offering a complex argument on what he considers the poet's progressive attitudes about women. Indeed, Frangieh does offer some convincing support for this argument in the form of quotes from Qabbani's discourse, poetic or otherwise. The information provided in the selected poetry, how- ever, about power relations between male/poet/lover and female/beloved/poetic sub- ject makes us question the details of Qabbani's and Frangieh's understandings of women's rights and liberation. The selected poems themselves are divided into three sections. The section head- ings are "From The Book of Love," "From One Hundred Love Letters," and "Other Poems." Bibliographic information and references to the Arabic publications of these works have not been supplied, an unfortunate oversight for the literary researcher. The three sections respectively contain twenty-five, fifty-one and twelve poems, giving us a significant sample of Qabbani's poetry and its translation. Across the sections, the careful reader can perceive changes on the level of stylistics and content in the selected poems, indicating developments or shifts over time. We can note the shift in poetics from tqf'ila (which is sometimes merely creatively spaced 'amudi poetry) to increasingly free verse texts. We also detect in the selections pro- found emotional shifts in the intimate relationships being imaged in the poetic texts. It is odd, then, to try to measure Frangieh's assertion of Qabbani's liberationist stance towards women through the lens of this love poetry. In intimate relationships, the negotiations of power and space are most critical, perhaps revealing internal contradictions in a single person's discourse. A gender reading of some of these poems articulates some stark limitations to or gaping loopholes in Qabbani's liber- ationist discourse. At issue in discourse concerning women's rights and women's liberation is the extent to which women have self-determined dispensation over their own lives and bodies. Number 4 of the One Hundred Love Letters seems to articu- late a hierarchy of worthiness in men and a hierarchy of desirability in the women who are "bestowed" on them (65). Frangieh and Brown's translation of the first lines of the poem "When God bestowed women on men / He gave you to me," ignores the distributional nature of the Arabic hana wazza' Alldhu 1-nisd-a (alä 1-i-ijdl. The Arabic forces us to understand a cosmic order in which women are sub- jected to being rationed out to men in such a way that the poetic persona has been particularly singled out with divine favor and good fortune. No one can accuse Qabbani'ss poetry of false modesty. Furthermore, the freedom for women, which may be otherwise invoked elsewhere in Qabbani's discourse, is peculiarly bound up in these love poems with the be- loved's attachment to Qabbani's poetic persona. In number 13 of One Hundred Love Letters, Qabbdni denies the beloved any being or agency outside of her attachment to him. It is the poetic persona who offers definition to the beloved in time and space. The poetic persona offers a circle of freedom, which he controls as far as his arm's reach, outside of which other patriarchal claims to possession of the female take effect. The poetic persona is the source of the learning which the beloved has enjoyed, a privileged entry into secret knowledge, the poetic persona's provenance. This translation is my alteration from that of Frangieh and Brown (88-93): .