Although Gibran’s artistic talent was quickly spotted by social workers in Boston when he was only twelve years old, and he gained the patronage thereafter of Boston notables such as Fred Holland Day and Mary Haskell, the immigrant network of young Lebanese-Americans around him remained a prime social reference. It was for them that he wrote his prose poems and vignettes for Arabic journals, which were later collected in such books as A Tear and a Smile and The Storms, and for them that he produced literary works such as Spirit Brides (literally the title might be rendered “Brides of the Meadows,” a reference to a Lebanese folk belief in vengeful naiads). It was not until 1948 that Spirit Brides was first translated into English, with an unfortunate title. The existing English translations have been called by one Gibran scholar “free and largely inaccurate.” Even were this not the case, decades have elapsed since they were carried out, and our language and literary sensibilities have changed so much that new translations are called for. The present version seeks to be the first academically sound rendering of a major Gibran work.

American readers who have enjoyed The Prophet will be keenly interested in Gibran’s earlier literary works both because they stand as eminently readable and because they show the development of Gibran’s thought. Here, he expresses forthright anger and outrage about social injustice, combined with a steadfast faith in the perseverance of the human spirit, all in a style that is graceful, fresh, and natural. These narratives, which appeared during the same era that produced the social criticism of Jack London and Up-ton Sinclair, differ greatly from the sober and oracular works Gibran authored in English two decades later.

On the other hand, many of the themes in The Prophet are foreshadowed in the early stories. The first piece here, “The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame,” is about a love that survived death and the destruction of the ancient Phoenician civilization in which it flourished. The anguish of love, endured by Nathan when his beloved abruptly dies as a result of the jealousy of the spirit brides of the valley, presages the reminder by Almustafa of Orphalese that love is a scimitar that injures and a typhoon that levels the garden.

The story “Marta al-Baniyah,” depicts a Beiruti prostitute as a victim of poverty and the cruelty of men rather than as an evil painted whore attempting to seduce upright citizens. Here appear several of Gibran’s ethical convictions, which later shape Almustafa’s discourse to the townspeople that fateful month of Ielool: that the god-self is ultimately immune to degradation, that evil deeds have origins that must be taken into account, that the adulterer’s sin cannot be understood without looking at the behavior of the spouse, that regret is itself a more painful punishment than society could mete out.

“Yuhanna the Madman” is a story of the conflict of a poor peasant boy with the powerful Maronite Catholic Church, and is probably loosely based on the life of an early nineteenth-century convert to Protestantism in Mount Lebanon, who was murdered by outraged Maronites. The narrative also recalls the revolt staged by Lebanon’s long-suffering peasants against their rapacious landlords in 1858-1860. Gibran, himself from a relatively poor family in the village of Bisharri, clearly identified with and unreservedly supported the exploited peasants. His willingness openly to attack the elite that still dominated Mount Lebanon in his own day stirred a fire storm of public debate back home and caused his works to be censored or excluded from Ottoman Syria altogether. Yuhanna is a type of the prophet, who sees clearly through the façade of conventional mores to perceive the evil that sometimes lurks behind them, and denounces the hypocrisy of laws that impose steep penalties on poor dirt farmers for the slight damage done by their livestock to a wealthy monastery’s vineyards. Yuhanna, like Almustafa, thinks that those who dress themselves up in morality in order to show it off would be better advised to practice nudity.