Poetry
شظايا ورماد
Not translated into English
Nazik al-Malaika · 1949
Synopsis
The poet's second collection opens with a preface, dated February 1949, which lays out the principles of a new verse based on the metrical foot, attacks the single rhyme and adopts as its own Bernard Shaw's maxim that the absence of a rule is the golden rule. There follow poems in free verse, haunted by death, among them “The Cholera”, written in October 1947 on the news of the thousand deaths of the epidemic in Egypt, where the word for death recurs three times in a row like a knell.
Context
The collection appeared in 1949, two years after a first book of poems written according to the old rules. Its preface, which critics regard as the first manifesto of free verse in Arabic, opened a long and bitter debate between the defenders of the old metre and those of the new form; the poet developed its principles in 1962 in an essay on the questions of contemporary poetry.
Who it is for
In Arabic; no French translation of the collection, a few poems in English in a bilingual selection. The preface reads like a manifesto.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author, with Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, one of the founding figures of Arabic free verse.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.