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BOOK REV I EWS breathless arousal reminds me of Nijinsky dancing Le Sacre du Printemps. More chaste but no less erotic is “psalm for an origin”, a passionate appeal to the god-within-us, echoing the Song of Songs. Some poems are experimental, and charming. A hangover is portrayed in “my aching head” where the poet and the reader “see stars”: “my * aching * head *** like * lumps”. Others aren’t so charming, such as the overly precious “the true lover”; or the language-poem, “credo”, (“confection-crapping a true Vatican box full of chocolate liqueurs”) ending abysmally with “compared to liberian rebels gang rape is poetry too”. And although the Dutch poet Victor Schiferli observes in an introduction, “the question of Israel and the Occupied Territories is a constant thread through Nasr’s work”, there is only one poem dealing directly with the matter. In “the subhuman and his habitat”, Nasr bitterly recounts a Palestinian welcoming a guest with instructions on how to get through and around checkpoints – even as people in wheelchairs and cancer patients must, “because that’s the whole idea”. However, the jewels in this collection are the operatic treatments of the lives and art of Dmitri Shostakovich (Stalin’s “holy fool”) and Willem Mengelberg (the “Boss” for fifty years over the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra). Each tried desperately to keep his art as the enduring and only truth, even in the face of cruel, ruthless regimes – Communism in Russia and Nazi occupation in Holland. Each poem is tuned and organized to the movements of major compositions: Shostakovich’s “Sonata for Viola, op. 147” (his last work before his death in 1975); and Gustav Mahler’s “Fourth Symphony”. Mengelberg worshipped Mahler, the Jew, and his music. He tried to protect the Jewish musicians in his orchestra, but finally acceded to the Nazi de-Judification of all art. Nasr has Mengelberg explain: “I am an artist/ and an artist must not/ get involved with politics”.These gorgeous poems do justice to the music. And what is poetry but the language form of human music? 210 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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FICTION BOOKS I N BR I E F The Mahfouz Centennial Library by AUC Press celebrates a hundred years since Naguib Mahfouz’s birth, republishing all the Nobel laureate’s translated works, comprising 35 novels, including his first, Khufu’s Wisdom, published in 1939, The Cairo Trilogy and his final novel The Coffeehouse, published in 1988, as well as a new translation of Mahfouz’s masterpiece Midaq Alley by Humphrey Davies.The volumes also contain thirty-eight short stories and a selection from Mahfouz’s very short fictions The Dreams and Echoes of an Autobiography, his reflections on the events that shaped his life.The first publication of its kind for any Arab author in the English language, this collection is a timely tribute to one of the Arab world’s greatest authors. American University in Cairo Press, NewYork, 2011, limited edition, hbk, 8000pp, 20-volume set, ISBN 978-977-416-503-0. FC. Homecoming: Sixty Years of Egyptian Short Stories, selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. Short story writing in Egypt was in its infancy when Denys Johnson-Davies first travelled to Cairo in the 1940s and began translating for English-language periodicals. In the sixty years that followed, he has become the foremost translator of Arabic into English and brings many of his translations together in this anthology of short stories, which gives an overview of several generations of Egyptian writers, from Teymour, Hakki, Gohar and Mahfouz, to later writers such as Mohamed El-Bisatie, Said al-Kafrawi and Radwa Ashour, as well as some of today’s writers, among them Hamdy el-Gazzar and Mansoura Ez Eldin. Over fifty stories are included, spanning several decades and various literary styles. Homecoming is a remarkably interesting and comprehensive anthology, chronicling the life of the Egyptian short story so far. American University in Cairo Press, 2012, hbk, 359pp, ISBN: 978-977-416-447-7. FC. BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 211

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BOOK REV I EWS

breathless arousal reminds me of Nijinsky dancing Le Sacre du Printemps. More chaste but no less erotic is “psalm for an origin”, a passionate appeal to the god-within-us, echoing the Song of Songs.

Some poems are experimental, and charming. A hangover is portrayed in “my aching head” where the poet and the reader “see stars”: “my * aching * head *** like * lumps”. Others aren’t so charming, such as the overly precious “the true lover”; or the language-poem,

“credo”, (“confection-crapping a true Vatican box full of chocolate liqueurs”) ending abysmally with “compared to liberian rebels gang rape is poetry too”. And although the Dutch poet Victor Schiferli observes in an introduction, “the question of Israel and the Occupied Territories is a constant thread through Nasr’s work”, there is only one poem dealing directly with the matter. In “the subhuman and his habitat”, Nasr bitterly recounts a Palestinian welcoming a guest with instructions on how to get through and around checkpoints – even as people in wheelchairs and cancer patients must, “because that’s the whole idea”.

However, the jewels in this collection are the operatic treatments of the lives and art of Dmitri Shostakovich (Stalin’s “holy fool”) and Willem Mengelberg (the “Boss” for fifty years over the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra). Each tried desperately to keep his art as the enduring and only truth, even in the face of cruel, ruthless regimes – Communism in Russia and Nazi occupation in Holland. Each poem is tuned and organized to the movements of major compositions: Shostakovich’s “Sonata for Viola, op. 147” (his last work before his death in 1975); and Gustav Mahler’s “Fourth Symphony”. Mengelberg worshipped Mahler, the Jew, and his music. He tried to protect the Jewish musicians in his orchestra, but finally acceded to the Nazi de-Judification of all art. Nasr has Mengelberg explain: “I am an artist/ and an artist must not/ get involved with politics”.These gorgeous poems do justice to the music. And what is poetry but the language form of human music?

210 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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