The themes of his Arabic works are familiar to readers of his English works: nature against society, spirituality, natural beauty, human injustice, and the destruction of the spirit by society. Most of his Arabic works were written before his books in English. They are more passionate and fresh, on the whole, than the English work, being products of his youth. The influences that shaped his writing were obvious. Most important was the contrast between the beauty of his native Lebanese mountains and the squalor of Boston and New York, where he lived most of his life. Lebanon, romanticized by exile, is the real setting of all his works. He championed the freedom and simplicity of the individual against the rigidities of society and protested the oppression of the weak, the poor, and women. He denounced the hypocrisy of organized religion, particularly his own Maronite church. Though his romanticism and anarchism may seem naive, the intensity of his feelings, the energy of his ideas, and the universality of the disquiet which he voices speak to modern men and women.

Gibran’s Arabic writings were translated after his death. These translations are not particularly good. Most are more or less inelegant and some are extremely inaccurate and misleading. Gibran’s reputation has suffered from them. We undertook the present series to provide fresh, contemporary, and accurate translations of Gibran’s significant Arabic work. The translations follow the original as closely as practical without doing violence to English style. We have not tried to imitate Gibran’s English style since we think that his Arabic works deserve to be judged on their own considerable merits.

The pieces in this volume each deal with romantic love. Romantic love, like life, was an absolute ideal for Gibran. Many of these pieces tell of the bitter unhappiness caused by the subordination of romantic love and personal happiness to worldly calculation. He saw women as the particular victims of rigid social customs and expectations and of standards that made marriage an economic transaction. The love of a man and a woman was a pure emotion, more spiritual than sexual, and was not to be compromised.