Al-Ahram Weekly 12 - 18 August 1999 Issue No. 442
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Monthly supplement Books for a burning month Holiday reading and what the writers read Translating Egypt Hala Halim finds consummate translation skills and less compelling ethnography in Ahdaf Soueif's most recent counter-narrative Extract from The Map of love By Ahdaf Soueif Metropolitan musings A new French translation of a Gamal El-Ghitani novel appeared last month. David Tresilian, in Paris, interviews the translator and meanders through the novel Francophone readers I know what you read this summer All writers and artists intereviewed by Hala Halim An elusive graveyard Ra'ihat Al-Burtuqal (The Smell of Orange), Mahmoud El-Wardani, Cairo: Maktabat Al-Osra (Family Library), GEBO, 1999. pp115 A century of fantasy Awalim Borges Al-Khayaliya (Borges's Universe of Fantasy), translated and introduced by Khalil Kalfat, Cairo: Afaq Al-Tarjama (Translations) Series, Cultural Palaces Organisation, July 1999. pp140 Author and character without disguise Manamat 'Amm Ahmed Al-Sammak (The Dreams of 'Amm Ahmed the Fishmonger), Khairi Shalabi, Cairo: Al-Hilal, 1999. pp285 What the winter said Youssef Rakha discusses Salah Abdel-Sabour's Layla wal-Majnoun, now part of the Kitab fi Garida Series, a joint project of Al-Ahram and UNESCO, translating an extract from the play Thus spoke the Ustaz To see other book supplements go to the ARCHIVES index.    Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross "Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996

What the winter said

Reviewed by Youssef Rakha

Layla wal-Majnoun (Layla and the Madman), Salah Abdel-Sabour, Cairo: Kitab fi Jarida, a monthly book distributed inside Al-Ahram, July 1999. pp29

Among the Egyptian poet and dramatist Salah Abdel-Sabour's later plays, Layla wal-Majnoun (Layla and the Madman, 1970) stands out in that it deals directly with politics and eschews the absurdist manner of, for example, Al-Amira Tantazir (1971) or Ba'da an Yamut Al-Malik (1973). Nevertheless, it typifies his capacities as a dramatist and contains some of his most memorable verse. Taking its cue from Ahmed Shawqi's Majnoun Layla (Layla's Madman, 1931), a virtuoso rendering of the age-old love-story of Layla and Qais, in which Qais, a young poet, is prevented from marrying his beloved Layla and ends in madness (in many ways the Arab Romeo and Juliet), Abdel-Sabour's play relocates this celebrated tragedy to the politically charged context of the months preceding the 1952 Revolution.

The play's action unfolds directly before and during the burning of large parts of Cairo on 26 January 1952. Almost all the political factions of the time, as well as the British colonial population they invariably opposed, have subsequently been implicated in this act, though the issue remains unresolved. Against this background Layla wal-Majnoun presents a group of very young, very inexperienced left-wing radicals, who, rather than engage directly in the kind of revolutionary acts of which they dream, have gathered around an elderly left-wing intellectual (identified simply as al-ustaz) to produce an oppositional newspaper. They are disappointed to find, however, that even here they are unable to voice their true opinions, due to unrelenting censorship.

When the play opens Hossam, a member of the group who had briefly courted the attractive and vivacious Layla, is in prison for political offences, and al-ustaz's latest newspaper article has failed to gain the censors' approval. Nevertheless he has managed to keep up his spirits and presents the group with a new idea. They should form 'An acting troupe/Whose meetings need not be longer than a few hours a week/Away from journalistic work...' The play they finally settle on, which they immediately begin to rehearse, is, of course, Shawqi's Majnoun Layla. The ustaz insists that Said, a young man who joined the group following Hossam's arrest and consequently has never met him, play the lead opposite Layla. Over the course of the rehearsals, as Said and Layla experiment with Shawqi's romantic, often sentimental poetry, the two aspiring young militants, somewhat predictably, fall in love, and thus begin to act out the classic story both on and off the stage.

Abdel-Sabour's first collection of poems, Al-Nass fi Biladi (People of my Country, 1957), set the tone for a whole new poetic tradition. As the first collection to be published in Egypt written entirely in shi'r hurr, or 'free verse' the book aroused much controversy. The Iraqi poets Badr Shakir El-Sayyab and Nazik Al-Mala'ika, among others, had shown the possibilities of the new poetic in the middle decades of the century; instead of the rigid structures that had hitherto characterised Arabic poetry, they showed that verse could successfully be written that, while freed from rhyme and from rigid metrics, nevertheless preserved rhythms based on the classic metres. Abdel-Sabour became one of the most dedicated proponents of the new style: 'I entreat you not to take this poetry too simply', he wrote in his brief introduction to the text, responding, with characteristic level-headed eloquence to early debates about its viability. Writing this kind of free verse, he continued, was far from 'simple'. Abdel-Sabour, who was also an important critic and translator, combined a profound knowledge of the Arabic literary heritage, particularly the life and work of Sufis such as Al-Hallaj, with a deep appreciation of the philosophical and emotional registers of modern European poetry. Among his avowed influences, which included Baudelaire, Rilke and Yeats, T. S. Eliot figured most prominently, and the unromantic and emphatically modern idiom that Abdel-Sabour forged for his poetry, as much as his impersonal, polyphonic exploration of the fragmentation and despair of modern existence, in some ways correspond exactly with Eliot's insistence on educated, multi-levelled rhetorical discontinuity and the themes of psychological dislocation, historical discontinuity and social alienation that inform works such as The Waste Land. In Layla wal-Majnoun, in fact, Abdel-Sabour pays tribute to Eliot by making his protagonist Said quote the famous lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: 'In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo'.

Always challenging for audiences when used as a medium for dramatic dialogue, it is perhaps not surprising that at its first performance at the Tali'a Theatre in Cairo the standard Arabic verse of Abdel-Sabour's Layla wal-Majnoun did not attract a larger audience. One should add that the theatrical impact of Abdel-Sabour's plays was never strong. Nevertheless their dramatic and poetic distinction remains beyond reproach: the idiom, though instantly recognisable as Abdel-Sabour's, is capable of a range of delicate variations, and drama is the ideal medium for him to juxtapose his many, subtly contrasting styles in such a way that each reflects ironically on each.

Dialogue is used as a vehicle for characterisation, even each character's individual progress towards self-knowledge and self-realisation being conveyed brilliantly through its use. The ustaz's polished hyperbole, for example, which reflects the weakness of his character and his inadequacy as an agent of change, is ridiculed by Ziyad, whose lines in turn represent some of the finest examples of Abdel-Sabour's subtly comic poetry, while the emotional, often gloomy appeal of Said's lines is contrasted with Hassan's impetuous commitment to the cause and his propensity for violence. The sensuous appeal of Shawqi's original, classical lines is, moreover, set off against the dialogue of Abdel-Sabour's own, more 'conversational' free verse, and both are further contrasted with Said's own poems, which reflect youthful literary dissidence, and with the colloquial Arabic lyrics of a popular song, to which Said, Hassan and Ziyad listen in the course of the play's final climactic scenes. These lyrics, significantly, praise Egypt and the happy, comfortable lives of its people. The play presents its audience, therefore, with a virtuoso display of poetic styles.

Though unquestionably a masterpiece when looked at in these terms, the play however also introduces psychological and philosophical dimensions that go beyond the immediate situation it tackles. It is Said's black memories for example -- his painful experience of poverty and his witnessing the sexual aggression to which his mother was subjected while he was a child -- that prevents him from expressing his love for Layla, despite her pleas ('Said/ look at me, touch me, caress me/ I am like a tightened string/ Wanting to loosen on your shoulders into songs and tunes...'). Driven back to Hossam, who has abruptly and inexplicably reappeared, she loses her virginity to him, even as another member of the group, Ziyad, discovers that Hossam, in a desire for ease and a comfortable life, has sold out to the authorities and has informed them about the group's activities.

From this point the pace of the play quickens, and Hassan announces his determination to kill Hossam. The group makes for Hossam's flat and find Layla there in her underwear. Hossam escapes, Hassan follows him, followed by Ziyad. Said, in a state of shock, breaks down and falls asleep in Layla's lap like a child, and on Hossam's return the following morning Cairo begins to burn. All three young men who visit Hossam on that fateful night end up in prison, while the others embark on futures away from the paper and the ustaz. The latter finally himself renounces his radical pose, and it is implied that Layla too will renounce her militant past and resume her relationship with Hossam. When she visits Said in prison, she finds him detached and unkempt, his conversation incoherent and nonsensical. Like Qais in the classical story, Said has gone mad.

The play's climax thus exemplifies Abdel-Sabour's characteristic existential gloom ('The year's winter tells me that I will die alone' is his most frequently quoted line), while at the same time presents the reader, or the spectator, with a complete set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, that acts (in Eliot's terms) as an 'objective correlative' for an historically specific emotion. Egypt, the play seems to be saying, is indeed ripe for revolution, but where will the new paths lead? Said, for his part, tells us that we are all waiting, as he says, 'After me will come someone to sharpen the edge of the sentence/ After me will come someone to immerse the vowels in fire/ After me will come someone to write my obituary/ After me will come someone to put the axe to my head/ After me will come someone to philosophise with words/ And sing with a sword'. Unlike his character Said, however, when Abdel-Sabour expresses what the winter said to him, he does so by means of an impressive poetic structure, and one which manages to eschew the kind of restrictive grand narrative that led Eliot to embrace Anglo-Catholicism while nonetheless plumbing the depths of the despair that led him to conversion. In many ways Abdel-Sabour's work is that of its era, and the story he tells us -- insofar as one can put it in these terms -- is that of the post-1950s Arab dream of a brighter, fuller future that was so often and so painfully frustrated. After Abdel-Sabour will come only further proof of the disillusion he so forcefully expressed.

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Salah Abdel-Sabour (1931-1981)

Born on 3 May in the Delta town of Zagazig, Sharqiya.
Studied Arabic Literature at Cairo University, graduating in 1951.
Worked as journalist and editor in various newspapers, magazines and periodicals, including the daily Al-Ahram, the weekly Rose El-Youssef and the monthly Al-Katib.
Worked as Egyptian cultural attaché in India,1977-1978.
Chaired The General Egyptian Book Organisation until his death in1981.

Published six poetry collections and five verse plays:

Poetry Al-Nas fi Biladi (People of my Country), 1957
Aqoul Lakum (I Say to You), 1961
Ahlam Al-Faris Al-Qadim (Dreams of the Old Knight), 1964
Ta'amulat fi Zaman Gareeh (Meditations on a Wounded Time), 1970
Shajar Al-Layl (Trees of Night), 1973
Al-Ibhar fi Al-Dhakira (Sailing in Memory), 1977
Plays Ma'sat Al-Hallaj (Tragedy of Al-Hallaj), 1964
Mosafir Leil (Night Traveller), 1968
Al-Amira Tantazir (The Princess Waits), 1969
Layla wal Majnoun (Layla and the Madman), 1971
Ba'd an Yamout Al-Malik (After the King Dies), 1975

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