THE ROMANTICS 146School where he says he was taught French properly.^75 He left school in 1922
before he had finished his education, according to some as a result of a
quarrel he had with one of the teachers. But he continued his studies on his
own: he was widely read in French literature and developed an early passion
for Alfred de Musset. After a brief spell as a school teacher he took up journal-
ism: he wrote articles in various papers and periodicals such as the Lebanese
al-Ma'ri4, al-Jumhitr, and al-Makshuf and the Egyptian al-Muqtataf, thereby
eking out a very meagre living.
Besides poetry and a number of unsuccessful short stories, marked by their
overtly moral and religious character, Abu Shabaka wrote some literary
criticism, including an interesting but rather amateurish booklet on the
intellectual relations between the Arabs and Europe, in which he acknow-
ledges the great debt modem Arabic literature owed to French literature,^76
as well as long essays on French and English writers such as Lamartine,
Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. He contributed shorter articles to periodicals
such as al-Mctrid and al-Barq on western authors like Dante, Petrarch, George
Sand, Victor Hugo, Saint Beuve, de Musset, de Vigny, Paul Valfry, Goethe,
Byron, Shelley, Tennyson and Browning. He undertook a large amount of
translation from the French, mainly of novels and plays and some poetry:
for instance four plays by Moliere, L'Avare, Le Malade imaginaire, Le Bourgeois
gentilhomme and Le Midetin malgri lui, a work by Voltaire, Micromigas, two
works by Bernardin de St Pierre, Paul et Virginie and La Chaumiere indienne,
and Alphonse Karr's Madeleine ou Sous les Tilleuls. Among his numerous other
translations were Lamartine's Jocelyn and La Chute d'un ange.
Abu Shabaka, however, is best known for his poetry. Apart from his early
collections of juvenilia, The Lyre (1926) and The Silent Invalid (1928), he pro-
duced five volumes of verse: The Serpents of Paradise (1938), Melodies (1941),
The Call of the Heart (1944), To Eternity (1944) and Ghahva' (1945)-which is
an anagram on Olga, the name of the woman with whom he had fallen in
love early in his life and who later became his wife after an engagement
which lasted ten years on account of the poet's poverty. Parts of this last
volume had already been published in the volume entitled Melodies. One
other volume. From the Gods Above,^11 posthumously published in 1959, largely
contains elegies on Arab poets such as Shauqi, Hafiz, Jibran, Fauzi al-Ma'luf,
and Ilyas Fayyad. These reflect the current romantic conception of the poet
which we have already encountered in the work of other poets.
Abu Shabaka's first volume. The Lyre, was published when he was barely
twenty-three years old, and it therefore not surprisingly shows the marks of the
formative influence on the poet's style and attitudes. There are some verbal
echoes from classical Arabic poets such a« ai.Ma'arri and Abu Nuwas; and in