Early Departure , livre ebook

Badre Shākir Al-Sayyāb The Early Departure
Abdulwāhid Lu’lu’a
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-10-30
Badre Shākir Al-Sayyāb The Early Departure About the Author About the Book Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgements Introduction أزهار وأساطير A: Flowers and Myths أقــداح وأحــلام 1) Cups and Dreams ديــوان شــعــر 2) A Book of Poems هــل كــان حـبـّاً 3) Was It Love? ســوف أمــضــي 4) I Shall Go أســاطــيــر 5) Myths ســراب 6) Mirage نـهــــــايــة 7) End فــي القــريــة الــظلمــاء 8) In the Dark Village أغــنيــة قــديمــة 9) An Old Song فـي الــســوق القــديــم 10) In the Old Market الــلقــاء الأخــيــر 11) The Last Meeting الــمعــبَد الـغـريـق B: The Drowned Temple شُبّاك وَفيقَة 1) Wafīqa’s Window 1 حــدائــق وَفــيقَــة 2) Wafīqa’s Gardens أمّ الـبــروم 3) Umm al-Broom (The graveyard which became part of the town) أمــام بــاب الله 4) Before the Door of God دار جدّي 5-My Grandfather’s House حـنـين فـي رومـا 6) Yearning in Rome النـبـوءة الزائفة 7) False Prophecy مـدينـة الـسـراب 8) Mirage Town نـبـوءة و رؤيـا 9) Prophecy and Vision المـعبـد الـغريق 10) The Drowned Temple أفياء جيكور 11) The Shades of Jaikoor لأنـّي غـريـب 12) Alien فَـرار عـام 1953 13) Escape in 1953 جـيكور شـابـت 14) Jaikoor Has Aged مـنـزل الأقـنان C: Slave Girls’ Abode رحـَلَ الـنـهـار 1) The Day Has Passed حـامل الـخَرَز المـُلـوَّن 2) Coloured Beads مـنـزل الأقـنـان 3) Slave Girls’ Abode دَرَم 4) Durham الـلـيلـة الأخـيـرة 5) The Last Night الـقـصـيـدة والـعـنـقـاء 6) The Poem and the Phoenix هـَرِمَ المـُغـَنّـي 7) The Bard Has Aged أنـشـودة الـمـطـر D: Chant of the Rain غـريـب علـى الـخلـيـج 1) Alien by the Gulf الـمـُخـبـِر 2) The Intelligencer عـُرسٌ فـي الـقـريـة 3) Wedding in the Village قـافـلـة الـضـيـاع 4) Procession of Loss يـوم الـطـغـاة الأخـيـر 5) The Despots’ Last Da (A song by an Arab Tunisian revolutionary to his companion) إلـى جمـيـلـة بـو حـيـرد 6) To Jameela Bouhaired رسـالـة مـن مـقـبـرة 7) Message from a Graveyard “To the Algerian Liberty-Fighters” جـيكور والـمديـنـة 8) Jaikoor and the Town رؤيـا عـام 1956 9) Vision in 1956 قـارىء الـدم 10) Blood Reader ثـعلـب الـمـوت 11) Death Fox الـمـبـغى 12) The Brothel الـنـهـر والـمـوت 13) The River and Death الـمـسيـح بـعـد الـصـلـب 14) Christ After Crucifixion مـديـنـة الـسـنـدبـاد 15) Sindbad Town أنـشـودة الـمـطـر 16) Chant of the Rain سـربـروس فـي بـابـل 17) Cerberus in Babylon مـديـنـة بـلا مـطـر 18) Town Without Rain حـفّـار الـقـبـور 19) Grave Digger شـنـاشـيـل ابـنـة الـﭼَـلَـبـي E: The Chalabi Daughter’s Lattice Balcony شـنـاشـيـل ابـنـة الـﭼَلَـبـي 1) The Chalabi Daughter’s Lattice Balcony إرَم ذات الـعِـمـاد 2) ’Irum of the Pillars فـي الـليـل 3) At Night فـي انـتـظـار رسـالـة 4) Waiting for a Letter الـباب تـقـرعـه الـريـاح 5) The Wind Knocks on the Door مـن لـيـالـي الـسـهـاد 6) Wakeful Nights خَـلا الـبـيـت 7) Empty Is the House جـيـكور وأشـجار الـمـديـنتة 8) Jaikoor and the Town Trees لـيـلـة وداع 9) A Farewell Night (To my faithful wife) أغـنـيـة بـنـات الـجـن 10) Song of the Genie Daughters يـا غـُربـَةَ الـروح 11) Estranged Soul أســير الـقـراصــنـة 12) The Pirates’ Hostage فـي المـسـتشـفى 13) In the Hospital أقـلّ مـن بـَشَـر 14) Less Than Human عـكّـاز فـي الـجـحـيـم 15) Crutch in Hell الـمـِعـوَل الـحـجـري 16) The Stone Pickaxe فـي غـابـة الـظـلام 17) Forest of Darkness لـيـلـة انـتـظـار 18 A Night of Waiting إقـبـال والـلــيـل 19) Iqbal and the Night Publications by the Same Author
About the Author
The author is an Iraqi citizen. He has a BA Hons in English; Master’s degree from Harvard; PhD in English Literature from Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. He taught English and comparative literature at seven Arab universities. He has published 62 books on literary topics, 40 of them are translations, English/Arabic/English.
About the Book
These are selected poems of the eminent modern Iraqi poet Badre Shākir Al-Sayyāb (1926–1964) who developed a modern style in writing Arabic poetry, which soon became popular in modern Iraqi and, by extension, Arabic poetry. Though a couple of his poems were translated into English and French, this is the first time that such a collection of his poetry has been translated and published.


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Badre Shākir Al-Sayyāb
Dedication
To the memory of a pioneering Arab poet
Copyright Information ©
’Abdulwāḥid Lu’lu’a (2019)
The right of ’Abdulwāḥid Lu’lu’a to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528969093 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Acknowledgements
To Ālā’,
the poet’s daughter,
for the permission to select, translate and publish these poems.
Introduction
The southern parts of Iraq have always been known as the fertile soil for breeding poets in both vernacular and standard Arabic. Like all human beings who inhale and exhale air, those of the south of Iraq seem to inhale air and exhale poetry. The marshes of ‘Imarah’, in the southeast of the country, blessed since the beginning of time by the waters of the Tigris, in its turn before joining the Euphrates in their incessant wasteful pour into the Gulf, have bred innumerable poets, who, for ages, have been singing nostalgically romantic tunes of love and nature. In the vernacular, and also in standard Arabic, we still have Lamī’a ‘Abbās ’Imārah’, who, even in her Californian self-exile has been singing nostalgically of love and Iraq. Her cousin, ’Abdulrazzāq ’Abdulwāḥid, has never stopped writing poetry in standard and colloquial Arabic, on political and mainly romantic topics, for the 70 years I have known him, until the last romantically sad farewell to Iraq, only hours before he passed away in his Parisian Hospital in 2015.
In Baṣrah, in the most southern part of Iraq, almost overlooking the Gulf, we have had so many poets in both colloquial and standard Arabic. We have Sa،di Yousuf, who has published poems extensively in standard Arabic that show various aspects of the ‘modern style’ in Arabic poetry. But the major poet in modern Iraqi poetry is Badre Shākir Al-Sayyāb (1926 – 1964).
Badre was born in a little hamlet, called Jaikoor, on a rivulet called Buwaib , which he considered an image of Stratford-upon-Avon. He never stopped celebrating his village and its rivulet in all he wrote.
Like most of his contemporaries, Badre started writing poetry when he was about 18 years old in the traditional Arabic style of two hemistiches and a mono-rhyme. In his first published collection of poems, Flowers and Myths , there is a poem dated 26-3-1944, which was published in an earlier collection entitled Withered Flowers , when the poet was barely 18 years old. From that date onwards, we find courageous strides in development, both in style and spirit. This was not uncontaminated by the French sentimentalism of the fin de siècle , permeating Egyptian poetry and literature in general, which was the model before the poets and writers of the 1940s, in Iraq and other Arab countries. In 1947, the eminent Iraqi poet, Nāzik Al-Malā’ika, published her second collection of poems entitled Sparks and Ashes , including a poem entitled The Cholera , about an epidemic that raged in Cairo at the time. Nāzik claimed that her poem marked the first example of ‘free verse’ in Arabic. What she did is that she liberated the traditional number of feet in the line of poetry to suit the image or the idea she is dealing with in the line, which may take two or three feet, rather than the four set feet in one traditional metre or the other. However, the lines, short or long, still fall within the traditional metre. That does not make the poem ‘free verse’, which, I am sure, Nāzik knew very well. She must have known that fact, even before she studied for her Master’s degree at Madison, Wisconsin, where she must have learned about Walt Whitman and his free verse proper. But the idea of freedom was highly attractive in the 1940s, in Iraq and the other Arab countries, and the poets did not fall behind in that new course. Nāzik gave the particular date of 27-10-1947 for the birth of her ‘free verse’ in her Cholera poem. This instigated Badre to proclaim that he had published a poem entitled Was It Love? dated 29-11-1946, which later appeared in his collection Flowers and Myths , and was published in Beirut in 1960. This insistence on precedence in publishing ‘free verse’ poems is rather insignificant, because what is more important is who continued and excelled in writing this new type of poetry. It is curious that Nāzik not only slowed down in writing this type of ‘free verse’ poetry, but she actually took a strong stand against it, and even exaggerated in writing in the traditional style of two hemistiches and mono-rhyme, even though divided into smaller sections in the poem. What is more important to note is that this development in the form and spirit of Arabic poetry started with the suspended odes of pre-Islamic times and never stopped since. In the Abbasid period, we have Deek-ul-Jinn of Ḥimṣ (777 – 850) who had experimented earlier with the traditional line of poetry. New forms like Qoma , Kankan and others were developed to make some poems suitable for singing and dancing. In Andalus, we have the muwashshaḥ and zajal , also developed to suit singing and dancing. In all these forms, the metre, rhyme and shape of the poem, in addition to the spiri