Poetry · A way to begin
A Man from the Empty Quarter
رجل من الربع الخالي
Saif al-Rahbi · 1994
Synopsis
Poems written between 1990 and 1992, in The Hague and Muscat, in which the Rub' al-Khali desert becomes less a place than a space of emptiness and meaninglessness. The night of the Bedouins, the wolf, sand and water, the tent, eagles and herds recur in them, along with valleys, ravines and mountains. The texts proceed by brief fragments and rapid sequences, founded on the instant; they also speak of memory, lost time and exile.
Context
The book appeared in Beirut in 1994, after titles published in Damascus, Paris, Casablanca and Amman. The poet spent his childhood on the edges of this desert. The text includes sections titled “Vallées et ravins”, “La dernière nuit” and “Fragments”, and the story of Salima al-Azdi. Extracts in English, translated by Khalid Mohammed al-Balushi, appeared in 2017 in the Oman Observer.
Who it is for
Prose poems made of short fragments and sharp images; some excerpts exist in English.
Prizes and reception
The critic Hatem al-Sakr reads the desert in it as a symbolic region rather than a landscape, in a study published in 2011.
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