Spirit Brides
Contents (8)
Table of Contents
BOOKS BY KAHLIL GIBRAN IN THIS SERIES
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame
I - Initiation (Autumn, 116 B.C.)
II - (Spring, 1,890 after the coming of Jesus the Nazarene)
Marta al-Baniyah
I
II
Yuhanna the Madman
I
II
Copyright Page
BOOKS BY KAHLIL GIBRAN IN THIS SERIES
Spirit Brides
The Storm
Broken Wings
The Vision
Translator’s Acknowledgments
I wish first of all to thank the many Lebanese friends I made in Beirut during the 1970s, who collectively gave me invaluable insights into their culture and language. They did so selflessly and graciously, despite the tribulations that were befalling them during the opening years of the Civil War. In 1978-1979 while in Beirut, I translated late-breaking Arabic news stories into English for the Monday Morning Company, often by candlelight because artillery duels had temporarily knocked out the electricity; I owe a special debt of gratitude to my editor and colleagues there. Without that Lebanese experience, producing this rendering would have been much more difficult.
My wife, Shahin, has been endlessly supportive and is the source of many perceptive comments on this text, which immeasurably improved it. My editor and publisher at White Cloud, Steven Scholl, has shown unwavering faith in and enthusiasm for this project. Brian Miller made many valuable suggestions, from which this translation benefited. My dear friend and colleague John Walbridge, fellow Gibran scholar and translator, has been a constant source of encouragement and ideas.
Introduction
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet has attracted readers in enormous numbers ever since its publication in 1923, so that he is said to be the bestselling American poet of all time, albeit he most often wrote prose poetry rather than verse as such. His prose poems owe much to the influence on him of American writers such as Walt Whitman. Gibran did not begin his career by writing in English, nor by producing philosophical essays alone. Rather, among his first published works were two innovative collections of short stories that came out in 1906 and 1908 (Spirit Brides and Rebellious Spirits) and a novel (Broken Wings) that appeared in 1912. These books, written when he was in his twenties, are characterized by a lyrical and dynamic style far different from the stolid classicism that had dominated Middle Eastern literature up until that time.
The U.S. readers of the 1920s and 1930s who made The Prophet such a success would have been surprised to hear of the existence of these earlier works, since they were penned in Arabic and published at an expatriate press in New York City. The period between 1880 and 1924 was (like the era since 1965) a time of greatly increased immigration to the United States; during those decades many immigrants came for the first time from the Eastern Mediterranean, from Sicily and Greece and Eastern Europe and Mount Lebanon, in short, from the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. Kahlil’s family, who arrived in the U.S. virtually penniless in 1895, was typical of this wave of immigration.