Celebrate World Poetry Day in Arabic

When I read poetry collections in Swedish (my native language), I am struck by two things.

1. Old Swedish poetry is not very old.
   The oldest Swedish poet I have read, lived in the 16th century. Arabic poetry, on the other hand, has been around since the 5th century, when the Swedish language didn't even exist.
2. Early poetry is written in verse and rhyme.
   I guess it is because poetry was first spoken rather than written. Rhymes and familiar patterns makes it easier to memorize a poem.

For Arabic speakers, every day is a poetry day.

From the beginning, the Arabic word for poem (qaSiida) did not mean just any poem. The word referred to a rhyming poem that followed one of 16 defined verse measures. Until year 1947, all Arabic poems was written in that way. I have met Arabic speakers who still do not want to use the word (qaSiida) if the poem is not in rhyme and verse.

What happened in 1947 was that Nazik Al-Malaika introduced (shi3r Hurr), which literally means free verse.

The first poem in free verse was The cholera. Nazik Al-Malaika wanted a rhythm reminiscent of the clatter of horses' hooves, which could be heard when the bodies of people who had died of cholera were transported. She did no find any of the existing verse measures suitable. Therefore, she broke them down into smaller parts and created a new form of poetry.

Here is a short piece of the poem.

To learn more about a particular verse line, click on the eye symbol below it. For example, you will discover that "everywhere" in Arabic is (fii kulli makaanin), which literally means "in every place".

If you want to know more about a specific word in the poem, just click on it. You may notice that the Arabic words for sorrow and darkness are in the plural. That is, it says ('aHzaan) instead of (Huzn) and (Zulmaat) instead of (Zulma). Several sorrows are worse than one and several darknesses are more scary than one.

Nazik Al-Malaika was an Iraqi poet. She wrote her first poem at the age of ten. Maybe she was inspired by her mother, who was also a poet. Wikipedia describes Nazik Al-Malaika as "one of the most influential contemporary Iraqi poets".

Her last name literally means "the angels". The word (malaak) means angel in Arabic and (malaa'ika) is the plural form of the word. The prefix (al) in the beginning shows that the word is in definite form.

If we are to celebrate World Poetry Day, we must do it properly. Therefore I will quote a few lines from another poem by Nazik Al-Malaika: To the poet Keats.

If you like learning Arabic through poetry, I'll be happy to inform you that there are more Arabic poems on this site. Some poems may seem a bit clumsy, but it does not depend on the original poem but on the translation. My goal has not been that the poems should sound as beautiful as possible in English. Instead, I have tried to stay as close to the original as possible.

When you read a poem in the original language, you become a cocreator.

The idea of all the poems on this site is that you should be able to understand them yourself, using the information you get when you click on a word or a line. My translations into English are just a support to make it easier to understand the original. Once you have familiarized yourself with the original poem, you can use your own imagination and think of how you would express it in English. By reading the original, you get a deeper understanding of the poem, and create your own translation.

There are a lot of Arabic poetry I would write about. I will do that in future blog posts. Which poems and poets would you like to know more about? Feel free to comment below. Happy World Poetry Day!