Recently Published Books: "Nisan" and "In the Precincts of the Temple"

Nisan — a melody every young man hums between his lips, and few have the power to set down its notes and play it in a book whose strings the printing press has tuned..

This lyre on which Nicolas Qorban played his melodies was not made of wood — not of wood only; he kneaded it of perfume and roses and butterflies' wings, of the juice of grape clusters and the honeys of bees that love "Nisan." And the fragrance of bosoms has its share in the dough of the lyre; its materials were carried in baskets plaited of leaves and blossoms, and it was fashioned in a hut.. or huts, and dried in seclusion over the fire of the burning body that looks out from every letter of "Nisan," despite "al-Hajj's" insistence in the introduction that it is matter and spirit both.

The great truth in "Nisan" is that Nicolas Qorban is a poet, of delicate feeling; and I have felt that feeling so keenly that I grew afraid of scratching it — with a sparrow's down or a butterfly's wing — were I to tell him frankly that among his daughters in "Nisan" there is this scrawny one or that lame one, or an infant girl he ought to have waited for, to let her grow, and then presented to people mature. Perhaps he feared she would die before anyone knew her — and I could wish that "A Nightingale's Nest," for instance, had died — or had never been born.

Once only in "Nisan" did I come near to cursing his coupling of words, when my eye and my feeling were pricked by "The Pregnant Lip" — its name, its description, and its comparison to "the red panties"... My soul was reconciled to him when I read the poetry in "The Lust of Color," when I touched the human being in "Pebbles of the Roads" and "The Reed-Pipe" and "The Road"..
Brother "al-Hajj": adultery in thought is a mortal sin — what, then, must it be in poetry, and in "Nisan"?..

"Nisan".. is a prelude to a book more abundant in matter and richer in vocabulary — so that the poet will not be driven to use the same word dozens of times — and deeper in feeling, more concentrated, and more mature..

I do not wish to believe that Nicolas Qorban has locked up his poetic gift on an autumn leaf, or that he has locked up his heart on a mulberry leaf!

Here is the poem "A Feather" from Nisan.

Nisan is a story I wrote, I and a burning candle,
and I did not invent its tidings, for it lived in my breast.

And I made it no necklace, no bodice of buttons,
because I am poor.

Who will buy my feathers and my candle, that I may bring it an embroidered shirt,
and a sandal blended with light?

No one. And no one bought our roses,
so they wilted on the branches.
And people envied our season.

You would imagine this the title of a book of philosophy or history, or of barren research. No — it is a story.. or rather ideas and opinions dressed in the frame of a story, so as to be easier to take in..

Mrs. Madeleine Arqash is prolific in her production; several books of hers have appeared, and she is preparing several more, and there is no doubt that she deserves thanks for this great effort, which shows plainly in what she writes. I imagine her writing, then tearing up what she has written to write it over again and polish it until it wins her approval, whereupon she sends it to press.

The problem Mrs. Arqash treats — and for which she deserves thanks — is sectarianism, the most destructive of this nation's flaws. Nor does it lessen the book's worth that a great number, a very great number, of our writers and thinkers and young men and women have treated this subject. For the author has her own style and her own way of setting out her ideas and presenting them.

I could have wished that Mrs. Arqash had abridged somewhat the recounting of the citadel's history, the description of Ras al-Ain, and the social lectures, and had left it to the story itself to carry the idea and argue it through its events, not on the tongues of its heroes — even had she been forced to write a book on each of these subjects!

Mrs. Madeleine Arqash is a social reformer; people will remember her kindly whenever they recall that we in Lebanon were once sects at one another's throats!!