Poetry
صور
Not translated into English
Abbas Beydoun · 1985
Synopsis
The poem, in three movements, takes as its subject the city of Tyre, where its author arrived as a child. The first passage, devoted to the sea, has the breath of an epic song; the following ones return to the city's past, to its history and to the memories of the one who discovered it with a stranger's eyes. The text also partakes of autobiography: the poet's life enters it, as it will enter all his books.
Context
The poem appears in book form in Beirut in 1985, under the title Ṣūr, qaṣīda, from the publisher Muʾassasat al-abḥāth al-ʿarabiyya, in seventy-seven illustrated pages; it is its author's first book, who had been publishing poems in journals since the early 1970s. The lines about the shore were written in Bint Jbeil, far from the city. The author, who taught in Tyre and still keeps a house there, still calls himself a man of Tyre, and sees his own life run through his poetic work from this text onwards.
Who it is for
A prose poem in Arabic, with no French or English translation; three movements to be read in one sitting.
Prizes and reception
An early text, to which the poet still returns in his interviews, more than forty years after its publication.
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