Meditations on poetry
By
Naguib Mahfouz
My earliest literary discoveries were to do with poetry. After falling in love with it, and of course trying my own hand at it, the scope of my interest broadened and I began to read foreign poets. Baudelaire is inextricably linked in my mind with this period, particularly Les Fleurs du Mal. There existed at the time a beautiful Arabic translation which has not been printed since. This is regrettable not only because of the quality of the translation but because the book is one no aspiring young intellectual should be deprived of.
In my youth I also read Sufi poetry of every orientation. Jalaluddin Al-Rumi's work, in particular, absorbed me. I read the quatrains of Omar Khayyam in both Ahmed Rami and El- Seba'i's translations and while the former was more precise -- Rami was fluent in Farsi -- the latter, I felt, was more beautiful. This interest in poetry stayed with me well into adulthood, even after I had abandoned writing poetry altogether. And as for the brief lines that make their way into novels like Al-Shahhaz (The Beggar), well, all I remember of that particular instance is that the critic Abdel- Qader El-Qutt told me it would have been better to solicit the service of a poet rather than doing it myself. He was probably right.
Part of the reason I found the novel so suited to my own purposes is to do with its flexibility. I felt that poetry, alongside narrative, meditation, dialogue and character building, is one of the things one might practice within the novel -- whether literally speaking or by investing one's prose with a poetic touch, likely to be a rather more successful endeavour for a novelist. Poetry remains in a deep part of the psyche, a thing sought and relished forever.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy
