Khalil Mutran

I believe we have fallen short of what we owe Khalil Mutran.

It is an injustice that this great poet should have gone from us, two months ago, and that we hear no Arab poet — or say rather, no Arab man of letters — speak of Khalil Mutran anything lofty and enduring.

As if Mutran were not the crowning delight of Arabic letters in the twentieth century?!

As if Mutran were not the one poetic treasure held in the vaults of Arabic poetry?!

And as if everything had not gone in the going of Khalil Mutran?!

Many centuries may pass before God favors the nation with a poet like Khalil Mutran — a poet who springs from the very core of the people and struggles, with his soul and his blood, for the people, for the noble human being within the people; all the streams of his soul pour into the great human current, so that he lives only for these high human values, and composes only in the truth of these human streams.

And in "Nero," the first verse epic in Arabic literature, were embodied those powers with which Khalil Mutran's soul overflowed: the powers of genius in imagination, in artistic beauty, in magnificent imagery. "Nero" is the poem of heroism in Khalil Mutran — the song of the pent-up revolt in a broken, humbled people.

It is the rebellious cry in the breast of a poet of the age, appalled — among all that appalled him — to look and see nothing but the human herds marching to death beneath the whips of the executioners...

And "Nero" was a blaze among the Arab peoples; it was a storm of fire and blood... I do not know how much dry stubble it set alight, how many flames it kindled, how many withered branches it broke, in its whirling, from the tree of the Arab peoples!

But the certain thing is this: that this storm which Khalil Mutran unleashed — he who was among the first to unleash storms in Arabic literature — goes on whirling still... and remains flame and fire and blood, so long as liberties grow fertile only in blood and fire and flame...

F. Suleiman

Read the poem "Nero"
on pages 26 and 27

• Khalil Mutran was born in Baalbek in 1870.

• He received his education at the Patriarchal School in Beirut at the hands of Sheikh Ibrahim al-Yaziji.

• He edited the newspaper "al-Ahram" for some years, and founded in Cairo "The Egyptian Magazine."

• He was called the poet of the two countries.

• In 1947 the Egyptian government held a literary festival in his honor, in which the greatest men of the Arabs took part.

• The Lebanese government honored the great poet: on his last visit to Lebanon it awarded him the Lebanese Order of Merit, and His Excellency the President of the Lebanese Republic, Sheikh Beshara El-Khouri, bestowed it upon him with his own hand.

• His poetic works: "Diwan al-Khalil."

• The Khalil's diwans run to seven parts.

• He translated the plays of Shakespeare, and Dar al-Maarif will publish them shortly.

• He was the first to bring renewal into the modern school of poetry.

• Among his most beautiful and famous poems: "Evening," "Nero," "The Weeping Lion," "The Ruins of Baalbek," "The Pyramids," "The Slaying of Yazdegerd."

• He died in 1949 in Cairo.

• He was buried in the cemetery of strangers, and some of his friends intend to raise a tomb worthy of his memory.