LESSONS FROM LEBANON
SPIRITS REBELLIOUS, by Kahlil Gibran: Translated from the Arabic by H. M. Nahmad; Heinemann. Australian price, 10/-. T HE four short stories in this book were written in 1908 when the author was 25 ‘and, presumably, still living in Lebanon. According to the blurb he spent the last 20 years of his life in America, where he first started to write in English. From this book only it is difficult to judge him as a writer. The translator has seen fit to use formal, quasi-Biblical prose, and some of the phrases do not ring truly on the ear. I presume, knowing little about it, that Arabic is inclined to be a formal language, and that the translator was doing his best to keep close to the original, but the effect is not happy in 1949. Gibran is evidently a Christian. He comes out hotly against professing Christians and Muslims who put the institution and the world before the spirit. The first three stories are simply protests against Middle Eastern marriage customs and the capricious cruelty of arbitrary rulers, The fourth illustrates clearly the pattern of Gibran’s thought. The hero, Khalil (Arabic spelling is apparently in the same state as it was when T. E. Lawrence wrote Seven Pillars!), is thtown out of a monastery because he upbraided the monks for their luxurious living. He comes to live in a small village, is denounced by the priest as a heretic, but succeeds in liberating the villagers from their fear of authority, and from the world. They recognise that he speaks Truth, and that because he recognises and embraces it, the world has no power over him. Peace and happiness descend on the village, secure in its new freedom. With a message like this burning inside him, and the command of language to express it effectively, Gibran must have been most unpopular in the Turk-ish-controlled Lebanon of the beginning of this century. If his works have ‘not quite the same impact now, they are still very well worth reading.
G. leF.
Y.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 541, 4 November 1949, Page 20
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343LESSONS FROM LEBANON New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 541, 4 November 1949, Page 20
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