I Want to Live

Joumana Ahdab

This is the name of the diwan by Mrs. Joumana Ahdab which appeared last month. It is a collection of verse in the French language, made up of short poems which the poetess has divided,

according to the times of their composition, into four parts:

1 - I Want to Live 2 - The Green Hours 3 - Prayers 4 - A Complaint Against an Unknown

Whoever leafs through this little diwan cannot fail to be struck by Mrs. Joumana Ahdab's overflowing poetic spirit and her delicate sensibility... and he feels, too, a spirit of optimism and contentment flooding his heart.

Our colleague "Beirut" has rendered the first poem into Arabic, and we print it below — bearing in mind that the translation has robbed the poetic original of much of its worth and

splendor:

I want to live,

to understand, to love,

to drink deep of life

to the very dregs

To be drunk with happiness,

and to breathe in the flowers,

to breathe them in forever,

to the last breath

I want to run in the wind's path,

to sink my teeth

into the glistening fruits;

I want to laugh, to drown in laughter,

and to weep,

and to strike out across the earth,

far, far away

I roam the lands and the gardens

and plunge my head into the jasmine;

I want to feel

my youth,

and to dance

to the point of rapture

I want to be happy,

and to see, to understand, to suffer,

in misery or in bliss —

I want to live.

In My Library: The Story of Man and The Priests of the Temple, by Dr. Georges Hanna

At this moment, when we are witnessing the struggle of the forces of progress with the forces of reaction — in the lawyers' fight against the men of religion, for example; in the turn of modern pens toward treating the problems of society and curing its diseases; and in the awakening of the deprived classes and their demand for the right to live, over against the exploiting and monopolizing classes of rulers, chiefs, industrialists, and merchants... at this moment, when the instincts of humanity are locked in combat with the instincts of savagery, embodied in the calls for peace rising against the call of war — Dr. Georges Hanna comes before us with two books in which he pictures glimpses of this mighty conflict, whose roots reach down into the depths of history.

The first book, "The Story of Man," is a brief history of humanity's struggle in its striving to achieve a better world — the struggle led by enlightened leaders who outran their ages in their thinking and in their moral growth, and who faced the harshest difficulties to establish social justice and strike the fetters of ignorance and oppression from the children of men. It is the history of the liberating revolutions, beginning with Akhenaten, Moses, and Socrates, and ending with the French and Russian revolutions and the revolutions that followed them.

As for the second book, "The Priests of the Temple," it is a story taken from the very heart of our social milieu: the story of a poor family whose members fall victim to misery on the one hand and to despotism on the other. Some of them revolt against the condition they are in and try to spread liberating ideas in their surroundings, and their lot is prison, sickness, and destruction.

But the book is not content to picture one aspect only of society's diseases; it sets the deprived in their hovels against the privileged in their palaces — the luxury and greed of the latter against the wretchedness and sacrifice of the former — and leaves the reader room to think and to strive, or to be moved and to take heed.

Rose Ghorayeb