20 The New York Review
How Arabic Made It New
Anna Della Subin
City of Beginnings :
Poetic Modernism in Beirut
by Robyn Creswell.
Princeton University Press,
259 pp., $39.
In the autumn of 1961 a delegation of
poets arrived in Rome for a conference
called “The Arab Writer and the Mod-
ern World.” It was sponsored by the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, the in-
ternational arts organization that would
be unmasked, five years later, as a façade
for American intelligence as it waged
war against the Soviets on the battlefield
of culture. From London came
Stephen Spender, from Paris
John Hunt, a novelist covertly
employed as a CIA officer. The
Italian titan Ignazio Silone had
invited the participants with
a letter explaining they were
to discuss Arabic literature’s
“awakening to modern life”
and “its aspiration to com-
munion” with what Goethe
called Weltliteratur. It was to
be a purely literary meeting of
minds, Silone noted, free from
politics. Among the emissar-
ies of Arabic letters, unaware
of the source of funding, were
two Syrian poets from Beirut,
Yusuf al- Khal and a young
man who went by the name
Adonis, cofounders of the
avant- garde quarterly maga-
zine Shi‘r (Poetry).
“If we would live, we must
connect,” al- Khal passionately
declared in his remarks at the
conference. The poet argued
that Arabic literature must
break the chains of tradition
preventing it from reaching
the wider world, and tran-
scend its parochialism—views
with which Adonis concurred. Seeking
liberation from old authorities and hi-
erarchies, the Beiruti poets drew inspi-
ration from European and American
writers such as T. S. Eliot, Saint- John
Perse, and Ezra Pound, whom al- Khal
imagined in a poem as Christ. They
looked to a countercanon of medieval
Muslim nonconformists, such as the
heretic mystic al- Hallaj or the dissident
poet al- Ma‘arri, as well as to a litera-
ture more archaic than classical Ara-
bic, that of Mesopotamian mythology.
Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings
is the story of how Arabic made it new.
Beirut has been overlooked in classic
histories of modernism, yet Creswell,
a professor of comparative literature at
Yale, translator, and frequent contribu-
tor to The New York Review, has reme-
died this with eloquence and erudition
in his study of how a group of exiles,
iconoclasts, and émigrés—al- Khal,
Adonis, and the Lebanese poet Unsi
al- Hajj foremost among them—radi-
cally transformed Arabic poetry. In ad-
dition to abandoning traditional forms,
the Beiruti modernists sought to purify
poetry of the politics that kept it mired
in its own time and place. At a moment
when intellectuals across the Middle
East were divided along nationalist,
Pan- Arabist, monarchist, and Marxist
lines, Shi‘r was avowedly nonpartisan,
and talk of politics was discouraged at
the magazine’s weekly literary salons.
The question of what it meant to write
poetry without politics, and how one
might achieve this in a fractured city
on the verge of civil war, is threaded
throughout Creswell’s impressive book.
This study also speaks to the asym-
metries, still with us, of the mid century
modernist project and its quest to
create a world literature. Encounter-
ing Europe’s literary powerbrokers in
Rome, the Beiruti poets were surprised
to find their ideas met with reproach. In
his response to Adonis, Spender chas-
tised him for his “complete disregard
for the ancient heritage of Arabic po-etry,” finding his “demolition of poetic
traditions” too “extremist,” according
to the Arabic transcript of the confer-
ence. Although Spender criticized Brit-
ish poets for provincialism in dwelling
too much on their own pleasant isles,
non- European poets were expected to
retain “local color,” Cres well writes, if
they desired to participate in the circuits
of world literature. The Beiruti poets
sought to escape the confinements of
region. Yet their European interlocu-
tors, fearing the kind of standardized,
monolithic culture they attributed to
their Soviet antagonists, demanded that
nonwhite writers preserve and perform
their ethnic distinctiveness, to write in
culturally “authentic” modes. By refus-
ing to conform to entrenched rules of
how the poet should engage with iden-
tity, ideology, and heritage, the Shi‘r
group challenged the burgeoning inter-
national literary culture.The Arabic word al- hadatha can
mean either “modernity” or “modern-
ism,” and derives from hadutha, “to be
new.” The Beiruti poets were confident,
Creswell writes, in their sense of what
modernism was. It wasn’t to be found
in the silhouettes of sleek cars and rev-
ving engines, where Marinetti saw it, or
in “the latest feats in civic engineering”
that awed Hart Crane. The rising city
of Beirut, its architecture and crowds,is largely absent from the poetry of
Shi‘r. Instead, the poets were looking
out to sea. Their poems trace itinerar-
ies from ruined desert landscapes, cov-
ered with an Orientalist dusting of sand
and sleep, to open waters of adventure,
encounter, and exchange. “And by day
we go down to the ports of safety, /to
the boats with sails unfurled for travel,”
writes al- Khal in his Pound- saturated
trilogy “The Call of the Sea,” much of
which was serialized in Shi‘r in 1957.
It was a journey that, for al- Khal and
Adonis, was autobiographical, a mi-
gration from Syrian mountains to theLebanese coast but also a voyage away
from political engagement and toward
what Creswell calls “a heroized notion
of cultural struggle.”
Arabic modernism arose from the
ashes, Creswell writes, of ardent na-
tionalism. As teenagers, al- Khal and
Ali Ahmad Said Esber, both from vil-
lages in northwestern Syria, joined the
Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP),
a mytho- political movement founded in
1932 by the charismatic Greek Ortho-
dox liberationist Antun Sa‘ada. It was
Sa‘ada who first inspired them to look to
a deep, mythic past, and to forge a place
for Syrian literature on what al- K hal re-
ferred to as the “map of world literature.”
Sa‘ada called for a greatly expanded Syr-
ian nation—spanning the entire Fer-
tile Crescent—and saw archaeological
ruins as the bedrock upon which to stage
a national rebirth. Levantine people, for
Sa‘ada, were racially distinct from Arab-
Muslims: they were descendants of the
ancient Phoenicians, intrepid Mediter-
ranean seafarers who built coastal cit-
ies such as Carthage, Byblos, and Tyre.*
For Sa‘ada, cuneiform writings discov-ered in Latakia on Ugaritic clay tablets,
containing the earliest known alpha-
bet, proved that Syria was the true
cradle of Western civilization—a pri-
macy to which it needed to be restored.
The tablets involved myths of an ancient
Mesopotamian deity who dies and is
resurrected each year, and who has gone
by many names, including Tammuz. The
Greeks, according to Sir James Frazer
in The Golden Bough, mistook his title
for his name and called him “Adonis,”
or Lord. In the mid- 1940s, as a student
and party member in Damascus, Esber,
hailing from near where the tablets had
been found, adopted his mythic
nom de plume.
In 1955, after the SSNP as-
sassinated an army officer,
Adonis was caught in a mass
arrest of party members and
spent eleven months in prison.
It was “a year of torture, a true
hell,” the poet remembered,
and left him repulsed by what
he called “the nationalist
wasteland.” It convinced him
that while politics is a debased,
endless struggle for power, in
which only the names of the
tyrants change, a true revolu-
tion must come about through
culture. Fleeing Damascus,
which appeared to him a deso-
late, fossilized world, Adonis
moved to Beirut, which he
called the “city of begin-
nings.” Al- Khal, the older
poet, was already there, having
followed a similar trajectory of
disillusionment with Sa‘ada’s
militancy. The distance from
Damascus to Beirut is only
about seventy miles, but in
Adonis’s retellings it is as if he
voyaged to the antipodes. Be-
tween Lebanese independence
in 1943 and the outbreak of civil war in
1975, Beirut was in its belle époque, and
its Western- aligned government seemed
to interfere little in people’s lives and
business dealings. Oil money flowed
through Lebanese banks, shipments of
gold arrived in the port, and the new,
chic airport became the flight hub of
the Middle East. Sun- seekers flocked to
the beach clubs, while the street cafés of
the Hamra neighborhood, home of the
American University of Beirut, were
zones of intellectual debate. In the win-
ter of 1957 al- Khal and Adonis launched
Shi‘r, which would publish forty- four is-
sues over the next eleven years, in ad-
dition to numerous books under its own
imprint. The death of a nationalist poli-
tics became the birth of a new poetics,
as if to echo the myth of Tammuz.
In the pages of the little magazine,
modernism emerged in translation,
or, in al- Khal’s word, naql, which can
mean an act of carrying, transporta-
tion, or transfer, as well as a change
of residence. The poets often chose to
translate maritime verses, transforming
them on the level of the line, as Creswell
demonstrates, giving them what he calls
a “strange at- homeness in Beirut.” In al-
Khal’s translation of “Night” by the Cal-
ifornia poet Robinson Jeffers, a bleak
poem of human frailty on the Pacific
coast turns in Arabic into “a parable of
humanist fortitude set in a specifically
Lebanese seascape.” In Shi‘r, mod-Laure Ghorayeb: Untitled, 1968. Ghorayeb was a frequent contributor of poetry and translations to Shi‘r,
the magazine founded by Adonis and Yusuf al-Khal in 1957 in Beirut.Saradar Collection*It would hardly have mattered that,
as the scholar Josephine Quinn has re-
cently demonstrated, the Phoenicians
as a “race” were an invention of mod-
ern imaginations. Myths tell us more
about people’s visions of the future
than about their pasts.