Spirit Brides
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.
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.
Although these stories are vital and accessible to Western readers, they retain some features that betray their Near Eastern origins. “The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame” and “Marta al-Baniyah” depend for their dramatic effect upon a two-part symmetry, with an initial scene that contrasts dramatically to the second scene. This aesthetic of symmetry, with roots in Arabic literature, differs from the Western conception of a story as a narrative with a beginning, middle and end wherein the action is driven by the actions of the protagonist and their effects. It seems likely, as well, that Gibran’s devotion to drawing and painting inspired him with a keen appreciation for the value of contrast, and led him to give us a series of diptychs, of paired, contrasting tableaux, each depicted in loving detail. “Yuhanna the Madman,” on the other hand, comes much closer to the general Western story-telling model, with its series of conflicts between the protagonist and the monks, each driven by Yuhanna’s own actions and psychological bent.
Despite his Lebanese origins and the influence on him of Arabic literature, from A Thousand and One Nights to the Koran and the Arabic Bible, Gibran is a quintessentially American writer, a celebrator of the individual, of progress, of initiative. Like Whitman, Gibran combines his faith in progress with a love of nature, and his belief in the individual with a mystical pantheism. Yet Gibran is a hyphenated American, and those now seeking evidence of creativity and achievement in U.S. writing by groups outside the WASP elite might reconsider him. The work he produced in the first half of his creative life is an American literature in Arabic; what could be more multicultural?
His works have all the hallmarks of an immigrant literature—the feelings of alienation, of falling between two stools, of new possibilities and rebellion against old rigidities. His is a Horatio Alger story of ascent from the Boston slums near Chinatown to the chic galleries of New York’s intelligentsia in the roaring Twenties. Such an ascent exacts a price. Gibran’s troubles with the Maronite Catholic Church resulting from his modern, American anticlericalism (seen here in “Yuhanna the Madman”) are as old an immigrant story as the Pilgrims’ problems with the Established English Church and as young a one as Salman Rushdie’s difficulties with the ayatollahs. The immigrant finds it suddenly possible to experiment, not only with cultural forms, but also with values. Like Yeats, Gibran sought a pagan spirituality, engaged in meditative exercises, and believed in a vivid spirit world and in reincarnation. Gibran’s rejection of organized religion and conventional morality while retaining an interest in spiritual growth is, again, very American.
Because of works such as these stories, Gibran occupies a far different place in Arabic literature than he does in American letters. The short story, as opposed to the traditional tale, was not an indigenous literary form in the Middle East, and writers there began experimenting with it only in the late nineteenth century, usually modelling themselves on European writers such as Maupassant. Spirit Brides is among the first widely read books of short stories in the Middle East, so that Gibran must be seen to some extent as a sort of Arabic-language Edgar Allen Poe. The Arabic-speaking writers living in the American diaspora (al-mahjar) had a profound effect on literature back in the Middle East, similar that of the Paris-based writers of the Lost Generation on the U.S. in the 1920s. In Arabic literature courses taught to the approximately 180 million native Arabic speakers world-wide, Gibran’s works form part of the established literary canon, despite the occasional colloquialisms and grammatical idiosyncrasies in his writing that are the mark of his American experience and of his relatively limited formal education in Beirut.
Nor was working in the short story genre his only contribution. In an American context, Gibran was a neo-Romantic, influenced by Rousseau, Blake, Shelley, Whitman and Yeats, and by a selective reading of Nietzsche. The Romantic agony may have resonated especially well with the expatriate author’s lived experience of homesickness and cultural ambiguity. In Arabic literature, however, there had been no Romantic movement in the nineteenth century. Partially because of the European colonial challenge to culture and politics, from the mid-nineteenth-century Middle Eastern authors had attempted to revive techniques and concerns of the golden age of the medieval Muslim Caliphate. Against this backdrop of Neoclassicism, the new sensibilities of Gibran and others were refreshing, sensitive, and vibrant, and his work helped provoke an unprecedented vogue for Romanticism that lasted three decades.
These stories often depicted a tragic hero opposing the hypocrisies of a culture mired in tradition, protesting against the treatment of women in a highly patriarchal society, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and the vicissitudes of love. Students of modern Arabic literature have perceived a shift in the early twentieth century from fantastic and melodramatic tales of an episodic nature, centered on fate-driven heroic protagonists, toward realistic stories, often of victims, with more rounded characters and studies in psychological motivation. Social justice and some realist concerns become important.
This shift can be seen within Spirit Brides itself, as one moves from “The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame” to “Yuhanna the Madman.” Gibran is among those responsible for this reorientation. He also broke out of the confining classical style, developing a lovely prose poetry or poetic prose that employed delicate metaphors and similes and a taut concision of expression, inspiring many imitators, most of whom failed to reach his standard.
Gibran’s Romanticism was increasingly wrought up with a sort of Syrian or Syro-Lebanese nationalism. His idyllic depiction of Seleucid Syria in “Ash of Centuries” as vibrant and affluent, in contrast to the poverty-stricken Arab herdsmen and peasants of the Bekaa valley in his own time, makes an incidental statement about past national glory and present decadence.
Without wanting to argue that there is necessarily a direct connection, I wish to point out that Naguib Mahfouz, the 1988 Nobel Laureate from Egypt, began his career in the 1930s writing Romantic nationalist novels in Arabic that were set in Pharaonic Egypt. There is therefore a thematic link, at least, between the Romantic revolution in Arabic letters that Kahlil Gibran helped launch and one phase in the career of Mahfouz, the writer who ultimately succeeded in making modern Arabic literature an inextricable part of world literature.
Juan R. I. Cole
Ann Arbor, Michigan
6 August 1993
The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame
I
Initiation (Autumn, 116 B.C.)
As night grew quiescent life sought repose in the City of the Sun,1 and lamps were extinguished in the dwellings strewn around the mighty temples that nestled in groves of olive and laurel trees. The moon rose, spilling its rays upon white marble pillars that, looming like titans in the quiet of the night, stood guard over the sacrificial altars of the gods. The columns gazed with wonder and bewilderment toward the towers of Lebanon, perched among rocky debris on the ridges of faraway hills.
In that hour filled with magic stillness, wherein slumbering souls are united with their infinite dreams, Nathan, the son of the High Priest Hiram, arrived bearing a torch and entered into the temple of Astarte.2 Hands trembling, he lit the lamps and ignited the thuribles within, sending the aroma of myrrh and frankincense spiralling upward. He arrayed the idol of the adored one with a translucent veil, resembling the shroud of hope that encompasses the human heart, then genuflected before the altar embellished with leaves of ivory and gold. He raised his hands and looked toward the heavens, and from his eyes flowed rivulets of tears that begat streams. He cried out, in a voice rendered faint by painful travails and broken by cruel lovesickness:
“Thy compassion, O supreme Astarte! Compassion, O goddess of love and beauty. Have mercy upon me and stay thou the hand of death from my beloved, whom my soul has chosen in accordance with thy will. The philters and potions of the physicians have fallen short and the incantations of the priests and mystics have proven false and impotent, and no helper or succorer is left to me save thy sanctified name. Hear then my entreaty, and see how my heart is crushed and my affections tormented. Keep the cynosure of my soul alive at my side, that we might rejoice in the mysteries of thy love and be gladdened by the beauty of youth that announces the secrets of thy splendor. I cry out to thee from these depths, O holy Astarte. From behind the gloom of this night I seek refuge in thy loving-kindness.
“Hearken to me, then, for I am thy servant, Nathan, the son of the priest Hiram, who has his entire life stood in service at thine altar. I fell in love with a girl and took her as my companion, but the brides of the spirits envied us and blew into her frail body the breath of a weird illness.3 They dispatched the messenger of fate to convey her to their eldritch grottoes, and he lurks there even now beside her couch, raging like a ravenous leopard, his black wings billowing above her, stretching forth his rough talons that he might snatch her from my side.
“For this reason have I come to thee, abasing myself. Be merciful and spare her, for she is a flower that has not yet delighted in the beauty of life’s summer, a bird in the midst of her song celebrating the arrival of youth’s dawn. Deliver her from the claws of death, and we shall revel in hymns of thy praise, devoting burnt offerings to the glory of thy name, performing blood sacrifices upon thy altar, filling up the vessels of thy storehouses with vintage wines and scented oils, carpeting the halls of thy temple with roses and jasmines, and lighting sweet-smelling incense and aloe before thy likeness. Save us, Mistress of Miracles, and permit love to vanquish death, for thou art goddess of death and love.”