A Fruitful Return!

The poet George Saydah and his wife returned to Beirut last month from a journey to Europe lasting four months, which they spent traveling as tourists. Awaiting Mr. Saydah upon his return was an important event: the appearance of the second, revised edition of his book published last year, Our Literature and Our Men of Letters in the American Mahjars. It is a collection of lectures the poet delivered at the Institute of Higher Arab Studies in Cairo to the students of the department of literary and linguistic studies.

The book is elegantly produced, in some six hundred pages. In it the poet Saydah gives something of the history of the emigration, with its motives and its currents, which helps toward an understanding of the atmosphere in which Mahjar literature arose; then he presents this literature as he understood it: its birth and the stages of its growth, its influence upon Arabic literature at large and upon the literatures of the world, its characteristics, its messages, the fields of its activity, and the charges its opponents bring against it — nor did he forget the study of the life and works of each writer separately, from North America to South. The book is counted a trusted reference, for it came as the fruit of thirty years the poet lived in the Mahjar, counting and recording, observing and drawing conclusions; he left no aspect without giving it its fill of study and analysis.

Worth mentioning too is that our generous poet was among the first to look kindly upon the projects of the Lebanese Women's League and to encourage them through the continuous donations that began in Venezuela nine years ago and continue still — and rarely among our moneyed class do we find one with the open hand of Saydah. So welcome to him, and the warm congratulations of The Woman's Voice on the book.