Poetry
تلويحة الأيدي المتعبة
Not translated into English
Mamduh Adwan · 1970
Synopsis
A weary man addresses a city that has just been lost as though it were a woman, tells her he cannot love elsewhere, and returns to what he left in her keeping. Other pieces call up the battles of early Islam, a man leaning on his spear, a peacock, blood and birth intermingled. Those who held firm are defeated there, the others slipped away, and the poem does not say which of the two camps prevails in the end.
Context
This second collection appeared in the wake of the defeat of June 1967. It opens with a prose preface addressed to Quneitra, the Golan city lost in six days, whom its author treats as a beloved woman and to whom he says that he is tired and sad, that she is his old ailment, and that the indifference of faces reopens his wounds. The old Arab heritage supplies the rest: the wars of apostasy, Ali and Zubayr, the figure of the sacrificed man set against those who shirk, and a Palestinian fighter who comes to take the same place.
Who it is for
Verse in Arabic, with no French edition. It is necessary to know that several pieces rest on episodes from the first centuries of Islam, and that the loss of the Golan was then very recent.
Prizes and reception
Ranked by the Arab Encyclopaedia of Damascus among its author's major collections, it gave its name to a television serial by the same author.