drawings by Rodin in it?

Do you think there is a likeness between the two styles, or the two spirits? I hold another view... Rodin is a realist and a romantic; he takes his subject and carves it as interpretation... In his well-known statue, for example, he does not represent the idea of the kiss, but the actuality of the kiss.

How far apart the one of you is from the other!..

You, with your concise style and your mystical thought, are nearer to the ancient Egyptian art — a terse art that expresses beauty with the very fewest of lines... Contemplate one of the old Pharaonic statues: you will find that, with its fixed gaze, its few lines, and its gliding from one volume into another with a lightness that may sometimes escape the beholder, it carries us to horizons removed as far as can be from visible reality into mystical reality... Would that you had put Egyptian statues of the First Dynasty in place of Rodin, and multiplied them through your book — then it would have come out in better accord with your idea!..

Likewise the two dividing lines within the sections of a single poem are unhappily placed... Would that you had left a blank space between section and section, without artificial boundaries. And before I close my letter I want to whisper in your ear and say: the beauty of your style is only the complement of that mystical spirituality which reigns over the whole of The Lost Anthem, from its title through most of the titles: Reverie — Despair — Faith — Autumn — Confession — Rebellion — Death — Death-Agony... All these poems are a collection of drops evapo-rating in order to be united with God... Are you, then, the one who holds that last breath of life in the Arab world? Or rather, are you the one who possesses that force that would drive it toward suicide?..."

A summary of a great dictionary of the Arabic language and its literature, compiled by the late Lebanese scholar and man of letters Najib Khalaf after thirty years of effort spent in research, investigation, and verification. Death overtook him before he could bring it out and publish it.

The Sader-Rihani presses have issued a summary of the intro-duction to this dictionary, which runs to sixty volumes in the format of the great dictionaries, a single volume of which comprises more than a thousand pages. The introduction to this dictionary alone comes to some four thousand pages, containing studies on the body of the language, the origins of words and their measures, and the philosophy of the letters and their composition.

A work such as this is truly an enormous, mighty undertaking, beyond the powers of the great academies. Of it Professor Abd al-Wahhab Azzam said, on the day the Arab Cultural Congress convened in Lebanon in 1947:

"For this treasure to remain unpublished is a crime."

And Khalil Mutran said to its author: "You have not transported a dictionary — you have trans-ported a mountain."

To bring out such a scholarly mon-ument would be a great service to Arabism and to culture, and we call upon the great institutions of the Arab world to bring this noble idea into being.