THE PRE-ROMANTICS 70Not the least important of his literary activities were his translations of some
of Shakespeare's plays: The Merchant of Venice, Othello. Macbeth and Hamlet.
He also translated Comeille's Le Cid. Among his unpublished works are his
translations of Corneille, Victor Hugo and Paul Bourget. This is, of course,
not to count his journalistic work, which could fill several volumes.
As early as 1900 Mutran wrote in his periodical al-Majalla al-Misriyya:
It is by no means imperative that our mode of composing poetry should
remain the same as that of earlier generations of Arabs. The times in which
those Arabs lived are different from ours, their manners, their character,
their needs and their sciences are not the same as ours. Our poetry there-
fore should represent our own modes of thinking and feeling and not
theirs, even though it may be cast in their moulds and may follow their
language.^6
In the preface to the first volume of his Collected Works (1908), the wording of
which remained substantially the same in the second edition which came out
forty years later (1948—9), Mutran was more explicit:
The author of this verse is not a slave to it, he is not driven by the necessities
of metre or rhyme to say anything other than what he has intended to say.
In it the right sense is conveyed in correct and eloquent language. The
author does not aim at the beauty of the individual line irrespective of
whether or not it disowns its neighbour and quarrels with its fellows...
rather he is concerned with the beauty of the line both in itself and in its
context, together with the whole structure of a poem, the arrangement of its
lines, the harmony and concord of its ideas, beside the uncommonness of
the imagination, the strangeness of the subject, and yet the conformity of
all that to truth and its revelation of free, unshackled sensibility, minuteness
and accuracy of description.
Here Mutran, who is a highly conscious artist, introduces a number of new
concepts into Arabic poetry, which were destined to become almost unques-
tioned assumptions in the work of the next generation of poets — a thing
which makes Mutran hi many ways, and more than any other poet, Shauqi
not excluded, the true father of the new or modernist school of Arabic poetry.
Perhaps the most important of these concepts is that of the unity of the poem.
Hitherto, probably partly because of the need to observe one rhyme through-
out the work, the Arabic poem had in many cases tended to be ultimately
a collection of lines, in which no particular order dominates, apart, of course,
from the merely external order of convention: for instance, the convention
of beginning an ode or a panegyric with weeping over the rums, or descrip-
tion of wine or enumerating the beauties of the beloved. Brilliant as the
individual lines sometimes were, they were often very loosely connected,
and sometimes there was no connection at all: the poet simply digressed or