The Survival of Romanticism in Modern Arabic Poetry with a Special Reference to Farouk Shoosha (Published)
Due to contacts with the Western cultural milieu, new concepts and ideas were adopted by many European-educated Arabic poets who had been given a chance to read and translate English and French verse. The result was new generations who, influenced by the Western modernism, revolted against their accustomed literary traditions. Being influenced by the Western modernism implies an influence by its “Neo-romanticism”. It is ‘new romanticism’ because it represents a revival of the European romantic spirit which had informed the work of the Apollo Group in the 1930s. From Eliot, the Arabic poets took the theme of the ‘city’ (the ‘unreal city’) and from other modernists a variety of themes that this paper finds a continuation of the English Romantic movement. This paper tries to prove this in a number of poetic images in modern Arabic poetry with a special reference to poetry of Farouk Shoosha.
Keywords: Modern Arabic Poetry., Modernism, Neo-romanticism, Romanticism
Final Versions and Meaning Transformation: The Example of Maḥmud Darwīsh (Published)
It is usual for a poetic text to undergoe changes between the draft and the print versions. But Maḥmūd Darwīsh continued changing his poems even after they were in print, out of a desire to further refine his poetic output. I shall therefore treat a former edition of a poem as a draft of the later edition. In fact, Darwīsh not only made changes of this kind using a variety of techniques; he also made changes in the text that was recited orally before an audience. I have thus treated the recited versions as an “illegitimate final text”, since there are reasons why he made such changes. In a number of printed texts he also used the technique of exclusion, both in collections and in single poems. The question that I address in this context is the following: What are the relationships and dialectics between the various different types of modifications that Darwīsh made in his texts and the formulation of meaning as a message that the poet wishes to convey to the receiver?
Keywords: Draft, Final versions, Maḥmud Darwīsh, Meaning Transformation, Modern Arabic Poetry.
