Poetry
Abu Lala Mahari
Աբու Լալա Մահարի
Avetik Isahakyan · 1911
Synopsis
The most celebrated poet of Baghdad, who has lived for decades in the luxury of the city of the caliphs, gives his possessions to the poor, assembles a caravan and leaves in secret one night, without a backward glance. Seven suras follow the march through the desert, where he sends away one after another woman, father, friendship, law and faith.
Context
The idea is said to have come to its author in 1909, at the window of a train between Tiflis and Yerevan, at the sight of a camel caravan; a text of 1906 is held to be the draft. He wrote the rest in Europe, where six months in prison and the surveillance that followed had taken him. The first parts appeared in a journal as early as 1909, the whole in 1911, in Constantinople, from the bookseller Artsiv. Seven cantos of twenty-syllable couplets, and not a word of national colour, which was held against him in his lifetime. The character comes from an Arab poet of the eleventh century, read first in German.
Who it is for
A long poem in seven cantos, written in a single movement and with sustained violence. Better read straight through than in pieces.
Prizes and reception
The most discussed work of its author, translated in full into Russian by Bryusov as early as 1916, then into some fifteen languages.