November 7, 2019 21
ernism became an act of finding, even
in the most remote texts, words that
spoke deeply to the Beiruti poets’ sense
of identity and history, making more
local ideas of “heritage” seem limiting
and impoverished. Alongside poems
in translation, Shi‘r published original
Arabic poetry, manifestos, critical es-
says, and dispatches by correspondents
from Baghdad to Berlin.
While only Adonis would attain
global fame, in City of Beginnings
Cres well captures the intricate scene
that formed around Shi‘r, with the
magazine as a “nerve center” for many
writers still woefully untranslated into
English. These include the Iraqi free-
verse poet Badr Shakir al- Sayyab, au-
thor of the exquisite “Hymn to Rain”
and an ex- Communist who delivered
a keynote for the congress in Rome.
There were numerous writers besides
Adonis who took inspiration from the
resurrecting god, including al- Khal,
who occasionally wrote in the voice of
the god’s lover Ishtar, and Fu’ad Su-
layman, who used Tammuz as his pen
name. The Palestinian polymath Jabra
Ibrahim Jabra, author of Ta m m uz in
the City, would christen the poets the
“Tammuzi” school.
Creswell commendably situates
Adonis as one among many, but read-
ers may wish we learned more about
the women writers who were also a
part of the Shi‘r scene. We meet in
passing Khalida Sa‘id, who was among
the magazine’s most prominent literary
critics, was married to Adonis, and also
had a militant past in the SSNP. We en-
counter the acclaimed Iraqi poet Nazik
al- Mala’ika, an early Shi‘r contributor,
but as a commentator rather than a fig-
ure in her own right. The poet- scholar
Salma Khadra Jayyusi appears in an
endnote. The Palestinian poet Fadwa
Tuqan, who was in the inaugural issue
of Shi‘r, is absent from the book, as is
the Lebanese luminary Layla Baal-
baki, author of the controversial femi-
nist short story collection Spaceship
of Tenderness to the Moon, and whose
first novel was published by Shi‘r after
it was rejected everywhere else.
In the autumn 1958 issue of Shi‘r, the
twenty- eight- year- old Adonis published
“Only Despair,” considered by many to
be the first Arabic prose poem, shat-
tering the structures of classical meter
codified by the philologist al- Farahidi
1,100 years earlier. In Arabic, the same
word, bahr, is used for both “sea” and
“meter.” Adonis would call the new
form of the prose poem, or qasidat al-
nathr, “our ark and our flood.” Like
the Biblical cataclysm, the prose poem
drowned traditional forms while also
preserving and transforming them.
Since its enshrinement in the eighth
century, Arabic poetry had largely
stayed within classical configurations.
Lines of verse were, like Old English
poetry, made of two equal halves with
a caesura in the middle, creating a par-
ticular rhythm and music that defined
poetry itself. In the late 1940s free
verse pioneers such as al- Mala’ika and
al- Sayyab began to break away from
the caesura, yet still wrote in metered
lines, preserving the evocative music,
or tarab, that could strike deep emo-
tions in listeners. Responding to the
invention of the Arabic prose poem, al-
Mala’ika called it a “strange and hereti-
cal innovation,” and asked whether the
apostates were perhaps “ignorant of
the limits of poetry.” Fiercely attacked,
the Beiruti modernists looked to the
international authority of figures such
as Perse, Pound, and Eliot to sanction
their new, blasphemous form.
“Only Despair” would be revised and
renamed “Elegy for the Present Days”
in Adonis’s landmark 1961 collection,
Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, re-
cently reissued by New Directions in
a new English translation by Kareem
James Abu- Zeid and Ivan Eubanks.
While critics writing in Shi‘r hailed
the collection as a liberation from the
shackles of both meter and the state, it
was derided by Marxist and national-
ist critics for what they called its elitist,
solipsistic posturing, and by tradition-
alists for not qualifying as “poetry” at
all. The first prose poem, like many
works by Adonis, retraces a journey of
exile, from the ruins of a country left
for dead:The wind is against us and the ash
of war covers the earth.... In what
salt rivers will we wash this story,
stale with the smell of old maids
and widows back from the hajj,
our history stained with the sweat
of dervishes’ loins, its springtime a
feast for locusts?... My country is
a woman in heat, a bridge of lusts.
Mercenaries cross her, applauded
by the massing sands.... So we
go, chests bared to the sea. Old la-
ments sleep under our tongues and
our words have no heirs.Although Adonis had turned away
from politics in quest of a nonpartisan
poetics, the political was never quite re-
pressed in his lines. In 1958, the same
year “Only Despair” was written, the
Syrian Ba’athist party, fearing a Com-
munist takeover, brokered an agree-
ment with Egyptian president Gamal
Abdel Nasser to form the United Arab
Republic, a move bitterly resented by
the SSNP. Adonis viewed the union with
disgust. His earliest version of the prose
poem likened Egyptians to Mongols,
“men of the sand,” avaricious invaders
“pissing on the welcome mat.” The Syr-
ians abandon their violated nation for
the sea, boarding ships bound for an
unknown harbor. Creswell shows how
Adonis’s later revisions to the poem
removed such overt references, as if
to wash the politics away. Yet polemic
remains visible in the fabric of the first
Arabic prose poem, which still has pas-
sages verging on the Islamophobic (the
sweaty dervish loins) and misogynistic
(the smell of old maids, the woman in
heat), and is soaked with scorn.
In the poem, we meet for the first time
Adonis’s late- modernist antihero Mi-
hyar, the protagonist of the 1961 collec-
tion. “A dark man, rising from the sea,
full of the panther’s bliss, he teaches
refusal,” the poet announces. Though
he may take his name from Mih yar al-
Daylami, an eleventh- century Zoro-
astrian poet who converted to Shiism,
the inscrutable Mihyar is the mask of
many men: Odysseus, Orpheus, the
eighth- century poet Abu Nuwas, the
Sufi mystic al- Hallaj, Zarathustra (the
panther, satiated with blood, as in
Nietz sche). A “figure of extreme soli-
tude,” Mihyar hides under the waves
like a seashell. He is antipolitics per-
sonified: Mihyar wages no battles and
performs no deeds. “There he is, ad-
vancing under the ruins/in a climate
of new letters,” the poet narrates, “For
he is the knight of strange words.” Hishup.harvard.edu
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