A Translation of Abdel-Muneim Ramadan’s “Walt Whitman’s Funeral,” and Some Notes on Whitman in the Arab World

Abstract

We present here a translation into English of Egyptian poet AbdelMuneim Ramadan's (b. 1951) "Walt Whitman's Funeral" Janâzat Walt Witman], a remarkable 2012 poem that underscores the complex role that Whitman has played in the Arab world. As an aid to understanding the poem, we first offer a brief history of the Whitman-Arab relationship.The Mahjar, or "emigrant" poets, were a small group of Lebanese and Syrian writers in the United States, affiliated with the New Yorkbased Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hudâ. The group flourished in the 1920s. They did not have a project in common except to break with the patterns of traditional Arabic poetry. Mahjar in Arabic does not name a particular common project: it simply means the diaspora of Arabs around the world. The poets were scattered: Khalil ("Kahlil") Gibran (1883-1931) lived in Boston, Ameen Rihani (18761940) primarily in New York, and Mikhail Naimy (1889 -1988) in Walla Walla, Washington, but also New York, as well as, during the first World War, France (where he served in the American army). They had one thing in common: they absorbed American poetry, and their distance from a strict critical establishment (back home in Syria and Lebanon) gave them freedom to experiment. Whitman's name comes up often in their critical writings, and they seem to have agreed that it was Whitman's influence that allowed them to redefine Arabic poetry.Rihani, writing in the preface to his 1923 collection Hutâf al-Awdiya [Hymns of the Valleys], makes Whitman's innovations a pivotal point in literary history:Milton and Shakespeare liberated English Poetry from the bonds of rhyme; and the American Walt Whitman freed it from prosodic bonds such as the conventional rhythms and customary meter. But this freed verse has a new and particular rhythm, and a poem composed in it may follow numerous and varied metres.1He emphasizes the force of the break:This type of new poetry is called vers libres in French and free verse in English, that is, free, or more properly, freed verse (in Arabic al-shi'r al- Ķurr wa almutlaq)2"Free" versus "freed" verse: Mounah Khouri's translation of Rihani's essay (al-h/urr as "free" and al-mutlaq as "freed") captures something latent in the Arabic. Al-hfurr is "free" in the political sense. Al- mutlaq is perhaps "freer": Hans Wehr's dictionary offers "unlimited, unrestricted, absolute."3 Similarly, in English "free," a simple adjective, is a static state; "freed," a passive participle, is a state that results from an act of will. The translation takes that break with tradition a step further in intensity.Later in the same essay Rihani translates Whitman's "To Him That Was Crucified" (Ilâ al-masfub). Rihani was a Christian, but the effect of the poem is not sectarian. The vision of a utopian devotional community ("We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the disputers nor any thing that is asserted") may matter more than the Christ-figure of the title.Naimy, in a 1949 article, "Walt Whitman: Father of Free Verse," recapitulates the same argument in more specific terms-clearly directed towards the conservative Arabic critical tradition:The United States today leads the way in the world of industry, politics, war, and economics. It has not until recently, however, distinguished itself in any branch of art, literature, or philosophy, except in the free-verse movement. It was the American poet, Walt Whitman, who first advocated for this poetic genre and the first who practiced it with the might of a genius, the sincerity of a believer, and the enthusiasm of one who bears a new message. I have searched for a suitable Arabic word to describe this sort of baffling eloquence, that is something between poetry and prose, and I could not find a better word than al-munsarihfMunsarih is the name of a specific Arabic meter, one of many. Naimy's point is that it is used only infrequently:I do not mean that this word has anything to do with the Arabic poetic meter (al- munsarih) with the same name. …