and virtues.”^58 In other words, both were bent on de-centering tradition,
interrogating society, and ways of behavior and thought. Their ways only
ignite dissent and invoke further challenge. Tradition in this context is no
longer a sacred entity to be handed over to the new generation, as it is a
convergence and divergence of voices and attitudes. Using Pound’s “loose-
leaf system” to underplay the privileged textual presence of precursors, and
archival tradition at large, Riddel suggests the role of the present text as a
dynamic exchange, a different repetitive act, not an act of supplementation
to a sacred tradition.^59 What Adnnls articulates in this context may be
worth mentioning, for
as every age is simultaneously one and many, there is also a difference
in the meanings of past and pastness. We have our Arab past, but we
do not search for it in al-Ghazmll (d. 1111), A.mad Shawql
(d. 1932), and their likes; but we look for it in Imru’ al-Qays
(d. 540), AbnNuwms (d. 813), AbnTammmm (d. 846), al-Sharlf
al-Ra,l(d. 1016), al-Mutanabbl(d. 965), Abnal-‘Ala’ (d. 1057),
al->allmj (d. 922), al-Rmzl(d. 923), Ibn al-Rmwandl(d. 298 H.),
ShibllShumayyil (d. 1917), Fara.Anynn (d. 1922), and hundreds of
creative minds in our Arab heritage that had opposed and rebelled
against the familiar, the traditionalist, the ordinary, and the imitative,
and that were creative, innovative and resourceful.^60While debating many traditional articles of belief, modern Arab poets also
recognize the need to understand the limits of aspiration and achievement,
for after the passing of the early years of hope in the 1950s and the 1960s,
they found themselves eclipsed, and they began to write as rovers, vagabonds,
and exiles. Translation and exchange work dynamically in this intersection,
and the model of forebears, is not lost to modernist practitioners. But is the
moment of hesitation, perplexity, rejection, counter initiation, and search
uniquely modernist? Isn’t it there in the poetry of the precursors? The fore-
bears were no less involved in anxieties of influence that their contemporaries
wrote on these as creative tensions. Some critics were more pejorative, how-
ever, as they looked upon poems as sites of plagiarism. Al->mtiml(d. 998),
for instance, wrote on al-Mutanabbl’s plagiarism from Greek and, especially,
Aristotelian philosophy and wisdom.^61 Hence, present needs to widen hori-
zons received impetus from a creative past, as articulated in Adnnls’ previous
note, the one that had resisted imitativeness, and worked out its creativity in
trajectories of appropriation and translation. Whereas poets like Adnnls,
recognize this elemental revitalization against immobility and imitation, the
Moroccan Bennls traces in it the meeting grounds between the present advent
of the repressed and the ancient negotiation for fertile and transgressive
registers.^62 In this context, grounding in tradition and accessibility to current
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS