The dance (poem)

Khalil Gibran, around 1913

The round dance ( Arabic المواكب al-Mawākib ) is a 1919 poem by the Lebanese-American writer Khalil Gibran . It is the longest and most important of his few verse poems and at the same time one of the last works that he published in Arabic .

Structure of the seal and background

The dance consists of a total of 203 lines and 18 two-part chants. In terms of content, it is a dialogue between the complaint, which often slips into the cynical and nihilistic, about the human weaknesses revealed in society on the one hand and the sensual response of a voice of nature in mystical thinking on the other. Due to the repetitive, almost monotonous character of the speech of the nature-loving voice, it is formally given a refrain-like function. Thematically, the poem anticipates many thoughts that Gibran was to elaborate four years later in his main work The Prophet . It is already part of a more mature phase of his thinking.

Text example

Henryk Siemiradzki , shepherd boy, playing a flute , 19th century

في الناس مصنوع إذا جبروا الخير والشر في الناس لا يفنى وإن قبروا وأكثر الناس آلات تحركها أصابع الدهر يوما ثم تنكسر فلا تقولن هذا عالم علم ولا تقولن ذاك السيد الوقر فأفضل الناس قطعان يسير بها صوت الرعاة ومن لم يمش يندثر ليس في الغابات راع / ولا فيها القطيع لا فالشتا يمشي ولكن / يجاريه الربيع لا خلق الناس عبيدا / يأبى الخضوع للذي فإذا ما هب يوما / سار الجميع سائرا أعطني الناي وغن / يرعى العقول فالغنا وأنين الناي أبقى / من مجيد و ذليل

Man only does good when he is destined to do so; his bad deeds do not end in his death. People are tools; fate uses them one day; then they are useless. Do not call this learned and not honorable! The most excellent of men go with the flock led by a shepherd. And those who do not belong to the herd will be forgotten. In the forest there are neither shepherds / nor flocks, winter takes its course / without spring accompanying it. Humans were born as slaves of those who rejected submission. If one day this breaks out, / everyone will follow him. Give me the flute and sing, / the song is the willow of the spirits, and the sighs of the flute endure / nobles and slaves.

Analysis and interpretation

The "Cedars of the Lord" near Bisharri in Lebanon. Khalil Gibran himself often withdrew to this forest in his early childhood to play the flute .

The symbolist and transcendentalist poem is strongly influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson , through whom Gibran familiarized himself with, among other things, Neoplatonist and Buddhist ideas, but also by those of Henry David Thoreau , especially his book Walden . This can already be seen in the first stanza, whose concept of humans as "machines" and "herd animals" could almost exactly come from the essays by Emerson. “Fate” - in Gibran dahr , the destructive time much-quoted in ancient Arabic poetry - means here the constraints imposed on people by society and accepted only too readily by which they become servants and slaves.

In contrast to these models, however, Gibran uses a decidedly suggestive and fragmentary, but also deliberately sublime and classicistic language. It also remains unclear whether the two voices of the poem belong to the same figure, a godlike fool ( Madman ) similar to the protagonist of the first English-language publication Gibran, published a year earlier, or whether they can be assigned to two different men of different ages, an experienced one Wise men and an innocent youth.

reception

The poem is in particular also due to its setting in the form of the song Give me the flute (أعطني الناي) became very popular. The music comes from Najīb Hankasch (1904–1979), who, with the help of Gabriel Migliori, published it in Brazil in the 1930s, initially without much success. After he returned to Lebanon in 1947, he introduced the song to the singer Fairuz , who interpreted it in 1964 in a version edited by the Rahbani brothers and made it known throughout the Arab-speaking world. It contains excerpts mainly from the epilogue of the poem.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nadeem Naimy: The Mind and Thought of Khalil Gibran . In: Journal of Arabic Literature 5, 1974, p. 56.
2. ^ Translation from Khalil Gibran: The Music. The dance. Transferred by Ursula Assaf-Nowak and S. Yussuf Assaf . Walter Verlag, Zurich 1998, p. 40 f.
3. ↑ Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh: Gibran's "the Procession" in the context transcendentalist . In: Arabica 49/4, 2002, pp. 477-493.
4. ^ Nadeem Naimy: The Mind and Thought of Khalil Gibran , pp. 61 f.
5. ↑ See in particular the English translation of the poem by George Khayralla: The Procession . The Wisdom Library, New York 1958.
6. ↑ Ali J. Racy: The Lebanese Diaspora in Brazil and the US ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Afropop Worldwide, 2013.