Give back life to us
You have our pledge
To establishing, with the warmest tears,
Citadels for poetry, the keys to them from the valley of the muse
Your wounds a solace for ancestors,
A road to salvation for us.^39It is not difficult to see the negotiatory stance between precursors and ephebes,
but the negotiator is a rover who resists settling down, searching instead for a
full commitment to his vocation as innovator. Al-Khml’s dedication to Pound
reveals little of the dedicatee, however, for, to cite Bloom’s reading of elegies,
such writings “center upon their composer’s own creative anxieties.”^40
Addressing Lorca
Conversely, however, poems of total identification with their dedicatee usually
release the latter as a version of the present poet’s textual concerns, as if work-
ing hand in hand, or as one. Al-Sayymb’s address entitled “García Lorca,” for
instance, is dedicatory in full.^41 By absorbing the poetics of Lorca’s lyricism,
along with the latter’s paradoxical imagery, contrasts of bright colors and mod-
ulations of tone between tenderness and violence, al-Sayymb brings Lorca back
to life. Yet, in this dense recreation of Lorca’s text, al-Sayymb’s persona exists as
identical in concerns, anticipations, and practices. Both are haunted by a sense
of personal tragedy, rhythmically present in auditory images of rippling water,
lapping of sea waves, shouts, and bells. The blanket of blood is always there,
in Lorca’s poetry as in al-Sayymb’s “Unshndat al-mayar” (Canticle of the Rain)
and other poems, for the presence of unjust death receives focused attention.
Yet, poetically, it is a sign of rebirth as well.^42 Absorbed by Lorca’s poetry and
immersed in its resistance to the mechanical, al-Sayymb reads his own tragedy
and vocation in Lorca. His elegiac-lyricism is so much in tune with the
auditory and the visual in Lorca that both are one.
Although popular with many poets, Lorca receives different treatments. In
al-Sayymb’s poem, the opening lines recall William Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger,” but the
rest takes Lorca’s poetry as text and subtext, as al-Sayymb’s voice merges into that
of the murdered poet. The case is different, however, with al-Baymtl’s “Marmthl
Lnrkm” (Elegies for Lorca).^43 Although al-Sayymb’s paper boats emerge as paper
planes and his rays of light develop into a “halo of light” in al-Baymtl’s elegies,
these and other images and movements originally grew out of Lorca’s texts. In
these images, there is action and murder. There are cities rich with anxiety, love,
and death. What is distinctive of al-Baymtlis his resurrection of the abstract,
bringing it back as a concrete presence. Thus, Lorca emerges in person out of
al-Baymtl’s texts, to pierce the heart of the night with the pointed word (pt. 5).
Al-Baymtl merges into the fighters who people his Granada poems.
However, there runs throughout the implication that the city is no less
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS