Salah Labaki Is Dead

Glimpses of his life

— Poet, man of letters, and lawyer — president of the Ahl al-Qalam association.

— His wife is Mrs. Aida Kassab, daughter of the woman of letters Salma Sayegh.

— His only son, "Naoum," is 22 years of age.

— Among his poetic works are his collections: The Moon's Swing, Promises, and Weariness.

— Among his prose works: From the Depths of the Mountain, The Legends of Lebanon the Poet, and a translation of Baudelaire.

— Holder of several high decorations from the governments of Lebanon and France, and of an honorary doctorate from one of the universities of America.

— Radio Lebanon, Ahl al-Qalam, the Bar Association, and all the newspapers mourned and eulogized him.

— He was borne to his last resting place in Baabdat, in an official and popular procession, amid lamentation, tears, and burning grief...

★

Salah Labaki is a beloved name, remembered with admiration and esteem by the Lebanese and their Arab brothers in every land. The man amassed no fortune; rather he built a state of letters, thought, and poetry — a state stronger than states can be, not by its weapons and its fire and its iron, but by its learning, its renaissance, and its leaping toward the summits of goodness, truth, and beauty.

If every nation, every state, every people among the peoples has a symbol by which it is remembered, and a monument that immortalizes its glory and opens the pages of history to its men, then Salah Labaki is a shining symbol, an enduring monument, an immortal page in the history of poetry, law, and thought in Lebanon and the Arab world.

Such was Salah — the man who knew the worth of the letter, valued the beauty of thought, savored the sweetness of rhymes, and chose the word so that it might dawn in the soul as hope dawns, and settle in the breast as a beam of light settles, dreaming of the far tomorrow.

Salah Labaki was no weeping poet, nor was he the weak, submissive lawyer, nor the extremist thinker. He was love crying out from the depths, in poetry that melts as light melts upon the drops of dew; he was strength, all strength, in the stance of defending the innocent; he was thought soaring in the sky of truth, encircling it with pure imagination and clothing it in the elegant garment, so that people might read, in everything he wrote, the meanings of manliness in Salah the man, the brilliance of the poet in Salah the poet, and the uprightness of judgment in Salah the thinker. All that was Salah Labaki — and with all that, he was never one to lord it and grow proud and set himself above people, raising barriers between himself and them. He was with everyone and for everyone, a brother and a human being in the finest form in which a human being can appear.

And if works immortalize their authors, it is enough for Salah — the noble face we have lost, the beloved hope on which hopes were set — that his literary works and his social deeds should be a new life for him, which no death can reach, no shroud conceal, and no passage of time efface.

Sleep, then, Salah, with contented eye and quiet heart, beside the immortals; for you have been called to be the pole star of eternity, as you were the moon of the mountain.