EPILOGUE 262composed. The present vogue of poetry in translation, which is clearly notice-
able in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, may indeed mean that many readers
who are not acquainted with the language of the original, inevitably get only
a much watered-down version of poems in other languages. But it also means
that stylistic barriers between the products of different cultures are being
eroded, that in fact we may be moving towards an ideal of poetry which, para-
doxical as it may seem, is almost as international as science. International
poetry festivals have now become a fairly common occurrence. Paris has
recently witnessed the appearance of a volume of verse called Renga, a joint
production of four poets, a Mexican, a Frenchman, an Italian and an English-
man, who during five days (in the spring of 1969) collaborated, each in his
own language, in writing a single long poem (a sonnet sequence) using the
collective Japanese poetic form renga. Of this astonishing work, which prints
the original, together with a complete French translation, one enthusiastic
reviewer wrote: 'It consecrates the internationalization of poetry'.^2 Rimbaud
and Paul Vale"ry, Saint-John Perse, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, Rilke and
Quasimodo, to choose random examples, meet not only in Stanley Burn-
shaw's well-known anthology of international poetry called The Poem Itself^3
but also on the pages of the Lebanese poetry quarterly Shi'r where they appear
in the company of Jacques PreVert and Yves Bonnefoy, Anglo-Saxon poets
like Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edith Sitwell and Emily Dickinson,
Dylan Thomas, John Holloway and John Wain, and the academically not so
respectable company of beatnik poets like Allen Ginsberg. Recently, when
asked about the poets who have influenced his work, the Palestinian poet
Mahmud Darwish (b. 1942) listed, among others, Eluard, Aragon, Nazim
Hikmat, Lorca and Neruda.^4 This is the international cultural background of
the young Arab poet of today.
It will be noticed from this survey of modem Arabic poetry, however, that
in each of the stages discussed the revolt against convention was not entirely
a spontaneous and indigenous movement, but was inspired by the example
of western poetry, which seemed to act like a catalyst for the change or for the
desire to change. Furthermore, until quite recently Arabic poetry turned to
western fashions or styles after these fashions or styles seemed to have run
their course in the West. Perhaps the case of romanticism is the most striking.
By the end of the nineteenth century, when Arabic poetry was beginning to
enter into its romantic phase, European Romanticism which had set in more
than a century earlier had already given place to other movements: in France
to those movements which made 'modem' poetry possible practically all over
the world, in England to a Victorianism that was already showing signs of
disintegration. Mutran knew of the Alexandria-bom Italian futurist poet