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A TRAVELLING TALE ages, local landscapes drawn by anonymous artists at the turn of the last century . . . bronze statues, large and small: one of a woman carrying a white crystal torch, her flowing hair falling over her right shoulder down to her waist, like one of Botticelli’s heroines in his painting Primavera . . . Old, yellowing postcards of Ismaili Cairo: the old opera house, the fort, the Sultan Hussein mosque, the Nile boats with their towering masts and their tall, dark Nubian shiphands. whose faces were carved out by the Nile winds thousands of years ago and who were immortalized by Rainer Maria Rilke, when he wrote of his journey down the Nile in the early twentieth century. A Clara Rilke, s/s Rmses the Great, El Badrshein, le 10 janvier 1911; après 6 heures du soir . . . premier jour sur le Nil, nous relâchons depuis midi devant El Badrshein, l’obscurité est venue, d’un bleu nuit . . . 1 R. M. Rilke, Correspondances Œuvres 3 ; Seuil 1976 Meanwhile,Taha Hussein was writing his dissertation on Abu Alaa al-Maari, and neither one knew of the other . . . they shared an era but each had his own spiritual moment;Taha Hussein was absorbed in understanding Cartesian thought, while Rilke was disagreeing with Rodin and indulging in the poetry of Paul Valéry, during the belle époque. What a museum there is in this city, real and imagined! Alexandria . . . You look back and see Musa Saif al-Nasr Basha that afternoon, during that Autumn long ago, standing on his Sidi Bishr balcony, overlooking the sea in Alexandria, as he urged you to read him more of Paul Valéry’s poems and reminisced about his youth in France between the two world wars. The white waves of the Alexandrian sea came one after the other, crashing onto the rocks of the corniche, carrying with them the butterflies, flowers and roses of Greece. In your imagination, the waves danced with the waves of Valéry’s “Le cimetière marin”, those Grecian waves . . . they danced with the vivid blue of the afternoon sea, lit up by the sun, watched over by the silence of the gods, as you recite: 12 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

KHALED NAJAR Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes; Midi le juste y compose de feux La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée O récompense après une pensée Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!2 And so the text intermingles with reality and imagination intertwines with lived experience until you can no longer see their perimeters. Perhaps the imagined is real because it is mythical and the mythical is real because we cannot change it, or we cannot push it, as the Arabs say. The imaginary and the real are, ultimately, one and the same in human experience. However, here there are no boats with dove sails sauntering between the pines and no maritime cemetery either.There is nothing but the waves of this ancient sea, in their eternal return, crashing against the rocks of the corniche. which was inaugurated by Ismail Sidqi Basha in the 1920s. just as they now crash inevitably against the other side of the Mediterranean shore, or, as the Andalusians would say, they hit the northern side of the Christian shores, crashing against the forts, lighthouse and port of the French city of Sète, where Paul Valéry rests in his eternal sleep at the maritime cemetery and where the absoluteness of death merges with the absoluteness of pure poetry. Yes, that generation of Western poets and artists has disappeared; the generation of Paul Valéry, Saint-John Perse, Paul Claudel, Jacques Rivière, Paul Léautaud, Georg Trakl, Herman Hesse, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Modigliani, Klimt, Diaghiliev, the madman Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan, the golden dancer who had just stepped down from the Olympian peaks, and the elder poet Constantine Cavafy, that generation that continued to preserve the flavour of the nineteenth century in its works . . . A generation that continued to echo the heroic spirituality and crazed mysticism that had produced all the invalids and neurotics of the late nineteenth century: Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Stéphane Mallarmé,William Blake and Antonin Artaud, who, even though he was a twentieth-century artist, belonged to that era, and not to forget Henry Miller, the scornful saint. The list is long, replaced today by an agglomeration of contemporary poets, who, with the exception of a few BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 13

Page Text

A TRAVELLING TALE

ages, local landscapes drawn by anonymous artists at the turn of the last century . . . bronze statues, large and small: one of a woman carrying a white crystal torch, her flowing hair falling over her right shoulder down to her waist, like one of Botticelli’s heroines in his painting Primavera . . . Old, yellowing postcards of Ismaili Cairo: the old opera house, the fort, the Sultan Hussein mosque, the Nile boats with their towering masts and their tall, dark Nubian shiphands. whose faces were carved out by the Nile winds thousands of years ago and who were immortalized by Rainer Maria Rilke, when he wrote of his journey down the Nile in the early twentieth century.

A Clara Rilke, s/s Rmses the Great, El Badrshein, le 10 janvier 1911; après 6 heures du soir . . .

premier jour sur le Nil, nous relâchons depuis midi devant El Badrshein, l’obscurité est venue, d’un bleu nuit . . . 1

R. M. Rilke, Correspondances Œuvres 3 ; Seuil 1976

Meanwhile,Taha Hussein was writing his dissertation on Abu Alaa al-Maari, and neither one knew of the other . . . they shared an era but each had his own spiritual moment;Taha Hussein was absorbed in understanding Cartesian thought, while Rilke was disagreeing with Rodin and indulging in the poetry of Paul Valéry, during the belle époque.

What a museum there is in this city, real and imagined! Alexandria . . . You look back and see Musa Saif al-Nasr Basha that afternoon, during that Autumn long ago, standing on his Sidi Bishr balcony, overlooking the sea in Alexandria, as he urged you to read him more of Paul Valéry’s poems and reminisced about his youth in France between the two world wars.

The white waves of the Alexandrian sea came one after the other, crashing onto the rocks of the corniche, carrying with them the butterflies, flowers and roses of Greece. In your imagination, the waves danced with the waves of Valéry’s “Le cimetière marin”, those Grecian waves . . . they danced with the vivid blue of the afternoon sea, lit up by the sun, watched over by the silence of the gods, as you recite:

12 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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