Rindala

I will not say it is Said Akl's masterpiece; I will say it is one of his masterpieces.

For who has failed to see, in everything this poet has published, a towering masterpiece — passing from "The Magdalene" to "Jephthah's Daughter" and "Cadmus," down to "Rindala"? It is as though that pen which traced the first poems in enchanted ink no longer consents to write even at the lofty level at which it once wrote — as though it were racing against itself.

And "Rindala" is a school, not a diwan. We knew it, or knew most of what is in it, long before its publication — publication in its most splendid form — from the days when it was like the circle of Socrates; and after its publication it has become an academy.

And tomorrow, when the literature of Lebanon comes to be written, much will be said of "Rindala," and of its effect upon modern poetry even before the name "Rindala" was heard of in the world. It will be said that it was a challenge to the poetry of the thirties, a model for the poetry of the renaissance, an opening of horizons. It will be said that it exercised influence — but it will also be recorded that, without intending it, it worked harm: the day the homely woman took to copying the gowns of the beauty, forgetting that beauty lies in the body and not in the gown; and the day certain people admired canvases of art, and their imitations of them turned out caricature. And it will be said that lovers, after it, discovered something new in their beloveds — and that these women's dreams took on color and brightened.

"Rindala" was not published to be read once and set upon the shelf. Its poems are read again and again. Therefore our readers have a right to more from us than this brief word: in the coming issue we shall publish a full study of the diwan — until the next issue, then.