Bøger af George Nicolas El-Hage

This book contains twelve selected essays in English and two translations of individual poems by Mahmoud Darwish and 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati. The essays were written for various purposes. In addition, they were written in different places and under different circumstances. Some were delivered as lectures, and some were read at conferences, but all were published in different magazines, blogs, or journals. However, at the insistence of friends and colleagues here in the United States and in Lebanon, I was encouraged to collect them in one volume and make them all readily available. Given the diversity of the reasons that necessitated the writing of these articles, there is no primary theme or line of argument that governs the overall structure of this book. This book is simply a collection of essays on literature and language just as its title states, and each essay in an independent study or chapter in itself. The richness of this book is embedded in the greatness of the authors, poets, writers and critics that it deals with and with the genres and the time periods that it spans from Medieval to Modern Arabic Literature. The authors and poets discussed in this one collection of essays include: Abu Tammam, al-Buhturi, Ibn al-Farid, Gibran Kahlil Gibran, William Blake, T.S. Eliot, Salah Abdel-Sabour, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, 'Aziz Al-Sayyid Jasim, Ghada al-Samman, Stephen Krashen Mahmoud Darwish, and 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati. This book is like a garden with many trees and much fruit. It is my hope that every reader finds in it a tree with enough shade and interesting fruit to savor and enjoy.

Dear Parents, We all know the importance of reading to children, for as the proverb says: "Learning at a younger age is like engraving in stone." A child's memory is like a sponge; it absorbs everything that we teach the child, or like a smart camera, it captures all the images that it sees. We also know that when we train the memory to memorize at a younger age, it retains these images and words, and it plants them in the child's mind and imagination in a way that he will not forget them even after he grows to maturity especially if the reading and listening passages are in the form of songs that rhyme which also facilitate the process of memorization, repetition, and retention. All this is in addition to the priceless time of pure enjoyment which you as parents can spend with your children without being occupied with secondary mundane problems related to business and life. This is the reason why I wrote these songs. My hope is that you yourselves will enjoy them and read them aloud to your children many times and help them to memorize them and understand them and also explain to them the embedded cultural background pertaining to life in general and village life in particular. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the process of reading and comprehension, I also transliterated every song so that those who understand Arabic, but cannot read it, can still use and enjoy this book. Best wishes for enjoyable times with your precious children. George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D.

In Beirut '75, Ghada al-Samman shockingly depicts the tragic lives of fictitious characters who find themselves in Beirut, Lebanon prior to the outbreak of the war. Heralded by many critics as being a work that prophesied the Lebanese civil war, Beirut '75 is instead a work that expresses the existential and political views of its author and not the complete reality of the socio-political situation at that critical moment in Lebanese history. Even though Ghada al-Samman argues that the work is not autobiographical and that she does not profess any particular political stance, the work is permeated with her political views and her own personal life experience. The city of Beirut, torn between the East and the West, can even be viewed as a metaphor for the author herself.

Dear Parents, We all know the importance of reading to children, for as the proverb says: "Learning at a younger age is like engraving in stone." A child's memory is like a sponge; it absorbs everything that we teach the child, or like a smart camera, it captures all the images that it sees. We also know that when we train the memory to memorize at a younger age, it retains these images and words, and it plants them in the child's mind and imagination in a way that he will not forget them even after he grows to maturity especially if the reading and listening passages are in the form of songs that rhyme which also facilitate the process of memorization, repetition, and retention. All this is in addition to the priceless time of pure enjoyment which you as parents can spend with your children without being occupied with secondary mundane problems related to business and life. This is the reason why I wrote these songs. My hope is that you yourselves will enjoy them and read them aloud to your children many times and help them to memorize them and understand them and also explain to them the embedded cultural background pertaining to life in general and village life in particular. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the process of reading and comprehension, I also transliterated every song so that those who understand Arabic, but cannot read it, can still use and enjoy this book. Best wishes for enjoyable times with your precious children. George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D.

Dear Parents, We all know the importance of reading to children, for as the proverb says: "Learning at a younger age is like engraving in stone." A child's memory is like a sponge; it absorbs everything that we teach the child, or like a smart camera, it captures all the images that it sees. We also know that when we train the memory to memorize at a younger age, it retains these images and words, and it plants them in the child's mind and imagination in a way that he will not forget them even after he grows to maturity especially if the reading and listening passages are in the form of songs that rhyme which also facilitate the process of memorization, repetition, and retention. All this is in addition to the priceless time of pure enjoyment which you as parents can spend with your children without being occupied with secondary mundane problems related to business and life. This is the reason why I wrote these songs. My hope is that you yourselves will enjoy them and read them aloud to your children many times and help them to memorize them and understand them and also explain to them the embedded cultural background pertaining to life in general and village life in particular. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the process of reading and comprehension, I also transliterated every song so that those who understand Arabic, but cannot read it, can still use and enjoy this book. Best wishes for enjoyable times with your precious children. George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D.

In Lebanese scholarship and literature, Maroun Abboud is undoubtedly the pioneer of Realism and Pragmatism, a movement which he successfully led and which shed new light on the trend of writing which dedicated itself to the village and the life of the villagers and peasants. Abboud's writings, which were entirely dedicated to village life, stand as a decisive landmark that established a bridge between the old descriptions of country life and the new outlook concerning life in the village. There is definitely a marked difference between what we read about the Lebanese village or any village anywhere else in the rural Middle East and North Africa before and after Maroun Abboud. Yes, Abboud praises the beauty, serenity, and simplicity of the village, but he makes it clear that these qualities, which idealize the village, are not enough to enhance the villagers' daily life and that such descriptions and adjectives belong in poems, romantic stories, and songs chanted in the capital far away from the reality and true hardships of the village life.This book takes you on a journey in time between two worlds: the ancient and the contemporary. It comes full circle and is actually a quest for self-fulfillment and spiritual enlightenment. It is part history and part autobiography. It is also immersed in superstitions, mythology, religious liturgy, and church rituals. Whether you are a casual reader, a dedicated student, a government official, a simple villager, or a sophisticated city dweller, the book will educate you about the bittersweet realities of life in the village.

Dear Parents, We all know the importance of reading to children, for as the proverb says: "Learning at a younger age is like engraving in stone." A child's memory is like a sponge; it absorbs everything that we teach the child, or like a smart camera, it captures all the images that it sees. We also know that when we train the memory to memorize at a younger age, it retains these images and words, and it plants them in the child's mind and imagination in a way that he will not forget them even after he grows to maturity especially if the reading and listening passages are in the form of songs that rhyme which also facilitate the process of memorization, repetition, and retention. All this is in addition to the priceless time of pure enjoyment which you as parents can spend with your children without being occupied with secondary mundane problems related to business and life. This is the reason why I wrote these songs. My hope is that you yourselves will enjoy them and read them aloud to your children many times and help them to memorize them and understand them and also explain to them the embedded cultural background pertaining to life in general and village life in particular. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the process of reading and comprehension, I also transliterated every song so that those who understand Arabic, but cannot read it, can still use and enjoy this book. Best wishes for enjoyable times with your precious children. George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D.

Dear Parents, We all know the importance of reading to children, for as the proverb says: "Learning at a younger age is like engraving in stone." A child's memory is like a sponge; it absorbs everything that we teach the child, or like a smart camera, it captures all the images that it sees. We also know that when we train the memory to memorize at a younger age, it retains these images and words, and it plants them in the child's mind and imagination in a way that he will not forget them even after he grows to maturity especially if the reading and listening passages are in the form of songs that rhyme which also facilitate the process of memorization, repetition, and retention. All this is in addition to the priceless time of pure enjoyment which you as parents can spend with your children without being occupied with secondary mundane problems related to business and life. This is the reason why I wrote these songs. My hope is that you yourselves will enjoy them and read them aloud to your children many times and help them to memorize them and understand them and also explain to them the embedded cultural background pertaining to life in general and village life in particular. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the process of reading and comprehension, I also transliterated every song so that those who understand Arabic, but cannot read it, can still use and enjoy this book. Best wishes for enjoyable times with your precious children. George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D.

This book is an existential drama; it is an intellectual dramatization of certain events, which brilliantly depict the struggle of man and his existence in a triangular relationship with Time and Place. The book addresses the interrelation among three formidable entities that physically and rhetorically share this endless universe or at least the known part of it that we may comprehend. It is a brilliant dramatization of the hitherto mysterious yet inevitably interconnected relationship among the trio of Time, Place, and Man. They obviously cannot exist independently even though each one is unique in his identity, qualities, and characteristics, and ultimately, they fulfill each other. In A Train and No Station we are in the presence of a difficult text where every word is replete with infinite meanings and loaded with colorful symbolism. We are in the company of a challenging trialogue composed by an experienced navigator, a persistent author who is obsessed with the meaning of time. He is saturated with the anxiety of existence, inundated with existential tension, and is preoccupied with the mystery of man and with the question of human pain and the eternal search for the ultimate truth as he strives to find acceptable answers to these impossible questions. This book is also about a brave author who dared to challenge himself, to ask the difficult questions, and probe the unyielding responses to eternal riddles that have preoccupied man since time immemorial. These are questions that were only posed by those unusual thinkers who bumped their heads against the rock of eternity in their attempt to extract from the heart of the universe answers regarding the validity of time, the importance of place, and about man's place in the universe. They dared to probe the divinity of man and to explore the reality of history and the comfort of belonging. They asked about life and death and about traveling in time and in place. They pondered existence, the continuity of life, the origin of life, and man's relationship to others, to place and to time. They mused about the homeland and people's history and dreamt about the giant and the dwarf embedded in each of us and about physical, rhythmical, and spiritual places and times. And they contemplated man's ultimate destiny and his ability to choose, and whether man was entitled to free will or not, and whether the joy was in the journey and not in the destination, and in the trip itself instead of being in the outcome or in the final moment of arrival. In this unfolding epic, our author addresses this topic without forgetting to present us with a dose of historical reality that sheds light on the unfortunate present of his own beleaguered country. He offers a sober recommendation regarding the healing of his wounded land and how it can be redeemed, its history saved, and its politics mended and retold. Ameen Albert Rihani also shows us how to reconcile those irreconcilable differences by reversing Sartre's existential dilemma, which stated that "hell is other people." Instead, he teaches us that "the other" is not the enemy. Ameen invites us to come down off our high horse and embrace the other, to accept him, and to share with him, and to learn from him as well because diversity and humility are the spice of life and the absolute ingredient that greases the wheels of human civilization.

These hymns and poems were written between January 1975 and August 1976, mostly during the first year and a half of what has ironically been called the "Lebanese Civil War." The poetry and hymns in this book are an emotionally-charged document that reflects the state of mind of a young Lebanese poet madly in love with Beirut and Lebanon during the seventies when Lebanon was an oasis of fun and was bursting with creativity and positive energy on all fronts: literary, social, economic and political. Beirut was the major capital of literary production in the Middle East. The poetry in this book is a song for Lebanon. It is a celebration of its glory and endurance and a call for the Lebanese to unite. It is a cry in the desert of discontent against those who thought that destroying the previous society would bring about a new age of contentment, only to prove that their vision was wrong and that they were but a "false alarm" that simply caused unimaginable death, destruction, disappointment and sorrow. These hymns are both a praise for what Beirut stood for and represented in the minds and consciousness of the generation of Arab intellectuals and at the same time, they are a eulogy for the city that the Lebanese were unable to protect and preserve because of the many who took it for granted and others who allowed their jealousy and bitter ideologies to put the first nail in its coffin. (Black and White Edition)

As the title of this book indicates, this is Nizar's journey in life as a student, a son, a man, a lover, a revolutionary, a rebel, a diplomat, a patriot, an ambassador, a world traveler, a citizen of the world, a literary critic, a champion of women's rights, and a Don Juan. Above all, he is a pioneer of Modern Arabic Poetry and the innovative "poet par excellence" who stood firmly and honestly in the face of the literary and political establishments that held, at that time and for the past thousand years before, an absolute monopoly on the fettered mind and on the restrained imagination of generations of young Arab men and women, both politicians and intellectuals alike. Nizar stood unyielding. He was a "Man against [the] Empire." He was the uncompromising witness to his times and era, an effectual participant who helped shape the new movement in Modern Arabic Poetry and modernize the Arabic language and the Arab nation's outlook towards women, love, sex, emotions, and most definitely, patriotic sentiments that were until then politically correct but phony and void of any national passion or commitment. Nizar Qabbani was never a casual observer standing on the margin of history or a bearer of false witness and fake testimony; instead, he was the storm that brought the change and the mirror in which the Arab nation saw its putrefied and failing body reflected and suspended in a vacuum on the decomposed garment of tradition and worn out institutions. This book is not just an autobiography of Nizar Qabbani; rather, it is a comprehensive testimony of his era and a multi-faceted historical and humanistic document that records the story of the Arab nation's emotional, political, social, literary, and cultural struggle against its own outdated tradition, against foreign influences, and ultimately against itself and its own demons of superstition, magic, fables, and archaic beliefs.

This book is dedicated to all immigrants and children of immigrants. The book contains eight letters in English with the original Arabic version included as well. These eight letters are in fact a personal account of my feelings as a father, an immigrant, and a poet, towards my son. They are an emotional register of the dilemma of alienation, exile and loneliness that faces every immigrant, Lebanese or not, who, for various circumstances, leaves his or her country and emigrates abroad. These letters are a private record, a personal portrayal of my inner struggle. I put it out there in hopes that it may mirror the experience of many other immigrants and highlight their attachment to their first born in a foreign country with the feeling of joy mixed with guilt of attempting to raise a child without the support of family while desperately trying to provide a connection with the customs, traditions and culture from which the immigrant descended. It is my hope that any Lebanese, Arab or other immigrant families read their own reflection in these letters.

Dear Parents, We all know the importance of reading to children, for as the proverb says: "Learning at a younger age is like engraving in stone." A child's memory is like a sponge; it absorbs everything that we teach the child, or like a smart camera, it captures all the images that it sees. We also know that when we train the memory to memorize at a younger age, it retains these images and words, and it plants them in the child's mind and imagination in a way that he will not forget them even after he grows to maturity especially if the reading and listening passages are in the form of songs that rhyme which also facilitate the process of memorization, repetition, and retention. All this is in addition to the priceless time of pure enjoyment which you as parents can spend with your children without being occupied with secondary mundane problems related to business and life. This is the reason why I wrote these songs. My hope is that you yourselves will enjoy them and read them aloud to your children many times and help them to memorize them and understand them and also explain to them the embedded cultural background pertaining to life in general and village life in particular. Furthermore, in order to facilitate the process of reading and comprehension, I also transliterated every song so that those who understand Arabic, but cannot read it, can still use and enjoy this book. Best wishes for enjoyable times with your precious children. George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D.

When The members of the Pen Bond Association (al-Rabita al-Qalamiya), a distinguished group of "like-minded" authors to borrow Naimy's phrase, were busy writing and publishing in New York City and striving to modernize and change the course of Arabic Literature, there was another group in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt (The Diwan Group) trying, within the limitations imposed on them by their closed environment, to do the same but with much less success. Perhaps it is not fair to compare the achievements and impact of these two separate groups on the modernization of Arabic literature and poetry at the turn of the twentieth century and the three decades that followed because al-Akkad, al-Mazini, and to some extent Shoukry, although they were open-minded and wanted to be tolerant of new ideas and literary theories, they still lived in a very conservative and extremely traditional society that worshiped the past and adhered to ancient rules of grammar, linguistics, morphology, and prosody. In al-Akkad, Naimy found a partner, a "like-minded" counterpart across the seas, who shared with him some basic understanding of the role of literature, poetry, the poet, and the critic. These two prominent authors had more in common even if al-Akkad insisted on putting language above the poet, thus disagreeing with Naimy who believed that language is but an instrument and a means to an end. Nevertheless, it was befitting that al-Akkad was chosen to write the introduction to the first edition of Naimy's influential book of literary criticism, al-Ghirbal, because the Egyptian Scholar was also in his own way trying to innovate in an environment shackled with a heavy inheritance of outworn traditions and forced to still wear the outmoded garments of a bygone world. As a critic, Naimy ignited a revolution that set new standards for literary criticism in modern Arabic literature. Al-Ghirbal is a decisive and definitive statement which rejects the years of stagnation that plagued Arabic literature and offers new rules and guidance to replace the archaic ones. The book bravely admits that thanks to Western literature and theories of literary criticism, we started to witness a noticeable change in Arabic literature. It introduces and legitimizes the theater, acting, the role of the actor, the play writer, and novelist as well as the important act of translating and the vital role of the translator. Placing the book in its proper historical timeframe, we realize that many of the revolutionary ideas and concepts advanced in al-Ghirbal were at the time of its publication considered avant-garde, radical, and almost heretical. The amazing fact is that the message of this book is as relevant today as it was valid and pertinent then, and if Naimy returned to life, he would not change a word in the book. Al-Ghirbal's message was strong and clear. It was certainly meant to awaken the sleepy and "lazy" minds and souls and to shock, anger, and even hurt the sensitivity of its readers and the hosts of versifiers and pretenders who thought they were poets and drive them to rethink, reconsider, and reevaluate. All said, al-Ghirbal remains one the most powerful documents on literary criticism in modern Arabic literature since the turn of the twentieth century. It abounds with sarcasm that bites but also with wisdom that enlightens and guides. It also summarizes the position of the Pen Bond Association (al-Rabita al-Qalamiya) regarding poetry and the role of the poet and of literature as they viewed it and strongly advocated to popularize and modernize it.