Poetry
ديوان شاعر الوطن الكبير
Not translated into English
Ahmed Rafiq al-Mahdawi · 1965
Synopsis
Poems in classical verse that follow Libya from the Italian conquest to independence: the call to resistance, the deportees of the desert and the emptied villages, exile and longing for the native land, then the hope and disillusionment of the liberated country. The poet speaks in them as witness and as tribune, mourns the dead and exhorts the living, in a language made to be declaimed before a crowd.
Context
The collection appeared after its author's death, and its title takes up the epithet with which he had been crowned, that of poet of the great homeland. The pieces it gathers had first circulated during the years of Italian occupation and mourned the deportees and the camps of Cyrenaica as repression filled them. They are written in the inherited metre, with no concession to the free verse that the next generation would adopt, and the volume runs to a little over two hundred pages. It is still read and quoted in Libya today.
Who it is for
A divan in classical Arabic, not translated. The poems assume knowledge of the history of Italian colonisation, whose episodes they follow without naming them.
Prizes and reception
The collection brings together what had earned its author the name of the bard of the country, a reputation the schools have since maintained.