11 - 17 April 2002
Issue No.581
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 April 2002 Issue No.581 |
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Entrance to some forgotten temple
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 21, Cairo: Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo, 2001. pp583
The 2001 issue of Alif, a journal of comparative poetics published by the English and Comparative Literature Department of the American University in Cairo, has the Lyrical Phenomenon as its theme, investigating aspects of lyricism in Arabic, English and French literature, and containing numerous associated photographs and illustrations. The issue includes pieces on poetry and poetics, painting and photography, and philosophy and stylistics, and it is dedicated to the memory of Tom Lamont, an AUC professor and administrator who was also a well-known poet and literary critic. Lamont loved Egypt, which he made his home from 1963 until 1981, and then from 1993 until his untimely death in 1997, and he was also a lover of Arabic and Islamic culture. The frontispiece to this edition of Alif, combining an original photograph by Barry Iverson with Lamont's poem Siwa Door from the posthumous collection Siwa Door: Poems 1993-1997, is a tribute both to Lamont, whom many of us knew and admired, and to lyricism.
Souq Al-Imam, Cairo
photo: Mary Cross
Can one define lyricism? Two authors are quoted in the epigraph to the volume as having made attempts to do so. On the one hand, Naguib Mahfouz is quoted as saying that lyricism is the writer's final aim: "Literature that does not rise to the level of poetry [...] bears no relation to literature at all," he writes. And Andrew Welsh is quoted as seeing lyricism as a "distinctive way of organising language." Later in the volume, Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri offers her definition of lyricism as having to do not only with the organization of language, but also with the attainment of a certain sensibility. "Perhaps all lyricism is the expression of desire," she writes, "a reaching out for an unattainable fulfillment".
However, all the diverse articles in the volume in their different ways attack aspects of the phenomenon, finding ways of pinning down this evanescent concept. Since lyricism has traditionally been associated with poetry-- in fact the Arabic word for it is just that -- this most ancient literary genre is given the greatest space in the volume, especially in the Arabic- language section. Here, French scholar Richard Jacquemond inquires into the state of contemporary Egyptian poetry, while Sayyid Abdallah contributes a fine study of the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, who contributes to the issue in his own right with translations into Arabic of some of Lamont's poems.
A different note is struck by an article on political song in recent Egyptian history, charted through settings of poems by the Egyptian vernacular poet Ahmed Fouad Negm. In Muhammad Sa'ad Shehatah's application of Arab mediaeval literary theory to a recent poem by Egyptian poet Afifi Matar both the old and the new are combined, and, returning to the mediaeval period, articles by Mahmoud El-Rabei and Salah Saleh, respectively, look at poetic work by Al- Mutanabi and Abu Tammam. No discussion of Arabic literature can be complete without reference to Andalusia, and Amira El-Zein here examines Aragon's 1963 work Le fou d'Elsa about the fall of Granada in the context of its literary antecedent, Majnun Laila.
Arabic prose narrative receives attention in an article by critic Sabri Hafez, who chooses the Arabic novel of the 1990s as his subject, arguing that the many works produced during this decade marked a rupture with earlier sensibilities, and looking in particular at works by Nora Amin and Ashraf Al-Khamaysi. More unusual, in its emphasis on Arab traditions of calligraphy, is an interview with Mounir Al-Shara'ani conducted by critic Ferial Ghazoul. Here, Al- Shara'rani elaborates on this ancient and distinctive art, his prowess in it being borne out by photographs of his work, chief of which is a triptych illustrating the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In the English-language section of the issue there are many articles that will interest those more familiar with works in English than in Arabic. Randa Abou-Bakr looks at lyricism in Browning's dramatic lyrics, asking whether these should be considered "dramatic" or "lyrical." Browning's work is familiar, as is the work of Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot, which is treated elsewhere in the English section of the volume, but the articles gathered here offer many fresh insights that will provoke reflection. The section also includes pieces on Cavafy and Laurence Durrell, moving from this terrain to the possibly less familiar one of South African resistance poetry.
There are further pieces in the volume worthy of note, but perhaps nowhere is the idea of lyricism better captured than in Nur Elmessiri and Nigel Ryan's article "Arms Full of Things: Souq Al-Imam Shafei at the Southern Cemetery", which is aptly prefaced by Lamont's poem "Friday Market in the City of the Dead." Illustrated by photographs by Mary Cross, this whole section is not only lasting testimony to Tom Lamont's love for the land of Egypt, but it is also a poignant treatise on the vanity of human wishes.
Dwelling on things that people "have simply forgotten to remember," Lamont sees these as " merely the entrance to some forgotten temple."
Reviewed by Nazek Fahmi
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