Arabic-English Translation
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Kahlil Gibran: Love is a spirit and you its essence
Kahlil Gibran has written much on the theme of love. Below are two new English translations of his poems Love is a spirit and you its essence (الحب روح أنت معناه) and Some we love, but we do not come near (البعض نحبهم لكن لا نقترب منهم). The second poem brings to mind the figure of May Ziadeh who was his most famous ‘distant’ love. Love is a spirit and you its essence الحب روح أنت معناه Love is a spirit and you its essence With a good word you fashioned it Have mercy on a heart on the brink of Perishing and protect him with thy care When I…
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From Darkness and Light – May Ziadeh’s astonishing Eyes
May Ziadeh was a platonic and distant love of Kahlil Gibran. Such an inadequate way to remember her. More importantly, as poet, she is his female counterpart, even though she is virtually unknown in the English speaking world. Her poetry is beautiful in Arabic and sometimes has a poignancy difficult to capture in translation. She and Gibran corresponded for twenty years, although they never met. Perhaps, Gibran memorialised her in his poem Distant Love. This article is dedicated to May Ziadeh’s poem Eyes (العُيُون), originally published in her collection of poems called Darkness and Rays or Darkness and Light (ظلمات وأشعة). Ziadeh’s poem Eyes (العُيُون) speaks for itself. Her original…
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Darkness and Light: May Ziadeh and the Child’s Destiny
May Ziadeh’s poetry is evocative and striking. Her poem “The Child and I” is a notable example, and has a particular poignancy. The poem, which first appeared in her collection Darkness and Light 1923 (ظلمات وأشعة), tells the story of a conversation between a small English boy and an Egyptian or Arab woman. The poem was perhaps inspired by May Ziadeh’s thoughts during a real interaction, as it is told in first person. It occurs near the Nile, and we must imagine the encounter occurring at sometime in the 1910s or 1920s, when the British were the colonial power in Egypt. As we shall see, the poem begins with specifics…
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O Night of the lovers … by Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese or Lebanese American, poet, is best known for his beautiful epic poem The Prophet. We have owned a copy for many years and it is a pleasure to return to it. I had always assumed that he wrote the Prophet in Arabic, and that what we have in English, is a translation. It was only when I looked for the Arabic ‘original’, that I realised that there were different Arabic versions and, in fact, the English was the original version which he himself wrote. It is remarkable for a poet to be as talented in an adopted language as in their mother tongue. That was the…
