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A TRAVELLING TALE casion of the latter’s marriage. But later, he put his mouth to my ear and whispered furtively that he was PaulValéry’s pen pal and that Valéry admired his writing tremendously. Then he told me that he was Valéry’s reincarnation, and whispered as he brought his face closer to mine, that Valéry’s spirit inhabited him. And now, if I try to recall him with his empty stance and grey suit and grey hair flopping onto his forehead, he appears to resemble Paul Valéry. Valéry visited Tunisia in the 1930s and was accompanied on his trip by Guido Medina.When Valéry got on the ship to return to France, the Bey, the King, sent him an emissary to deliver theTunisian medal of honour, with the image of the current king, as the ship set sail. Paul Valéry, along with André Gide, had a profound effect on intellectuals across French North Africa, as it was called in those days, so much so that Mahmoud al-Mas‘adi’s Hadath Abu-Hurayra Qal is but an echo of Paul Valéry’s La Soirée avec monsieur Teste (1896). * * * And which lover of the classical world doesn’t love Alexandria! I felt the mythical weight of the word: Alexandria, Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, these cities that, like literary texts, are simultaneously real and invented . . . They are Malraux’s imaginary cities where the same civilizational epic repeats, albeit with different symbols and values. Alexandria. Yes, Hellenic, Greek, Latin, medieval, Arab, Islamic Alexandria, Sufi nook. And which lover of the classical world doesn’t love Alexandria? This city distinguished by its own geographic fate, a fate unshared by any other city on earth. It is the only global city on the edge of three continents. It is a city named by Alexander the Great, one of the over seventy other cities he invaded, each falling before him, one after the other. He gave all of them the same name: Alexandria. All of these cities have been destroyed, have gone back to nature, and have been eaten away by forgetfulness, except for Alexandria, which has survived as stone, human geography, legend and a dynamic text that has played central roles in the history of global and western consciousness. From the era of the museum, to the seventy translators who changed religious discourse by bringing the ancient Semitic 24 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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KHALED NAJAR texts to the Hellenic world, which consolidated once and for all the Egyptian and Jewish concept of one god in Greece, which eased the passageway of Christianity into Europe . . . to Philon, the stoic Platonic Jew . . . to Plotinus, who investigated Eastern wisdom and joined Emperor Gordian on his Persian campaign. After the Roman Emperor died in Iraq, the philosopher did not have the chance to imbibe Indian culture, and escaped through the desert to Antioch . . . to Anthony, struck by the southern goddess of love from across the sea, who sailed to the African shores . . . to Cavafy, who gave the city a new legend: Cavafy’s poetry in its turn renewed the city’s mythos. And so, for another historical epoch, Alexandria achieved its mythic-real presence that can only appear textually: in novels and poetry, because a landscape which remains unexpressed by creative work is a forgotten one, a natural blindness, the world before the word, mere darkness filled with God’s spirit. Modern Alexandria is also the city of Sayed Darwish, Georges Shehadé, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Lawrence Durrell, Giorgis Seferis, Nikos Nikolaides, al-Hakim’s autobiographical work and Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar . . . and the poetry of Joachim Sartorius. Each one of these figures has participated in creating the modern legend of this city. But the first ambassador of the city’s legend was the great Constantine Cavafy, born in it in 1863, and who spent all his life wandering its streets . . . and he survives in the texts of others, eternal Alexandria following him to the end of time: . . .You will not find other seas. The city will follow you.You will roam the same streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods; in these same houses you will grow grey3 Notes: 1 First night on the Nile; we have been resting since midday in front of El-Badrshein; darkness has fallen, night-blue. 2 This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by, Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly. Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame -That sea forever starting and restarting. When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding Are the long vistas of celestial calm! (translated by C.D Lewis; http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/fr/valery.daylewis.html) 3 “The City” (1910), http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/city.html BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 25

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A TRAVELLING TALE

casion of the latter’s marriage. But later, he put his mouth to my ear and whispered furtively that he was PaulValéry’s pen pal and that Valéry admired his writing tremendously. Then he told me that he was Valéry’s reincarnation, and whispered as he brought his face closer to mine, that Valéry’s spirit inhabited him. And now, if I try to recall him with his empty stance and grey suit and grey hair flopping onto his forehead, he appears to resemble Paul Valéry. Valéry visited Tunisia in the 1930s and was accompanied on his trip by Guido Medina.When Valéry got on the ship to return to France, the Bey, the King, sent him an emissary to deliver theTunisian medal of honour, with the image of the current king, as the ship set sail. Paul Valéry, along with André Gide, had a profound effect on intellectuals across French North Africa, as it was called in those days, so much so that Mahmoud al-Mas‘adi’s Hadath Abu-Hurayra Qal is but an echo of Paul Valéry’s La Soirée avec monsieur Teste (1896).

* * *

And which lover of the classical world doesn’t love Alexandria! I felt the mythical weight of the word: Alexandria, Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, these cities that, like literary texts, are simultaneously real and invented . . . They are Malraux’s imaginary cities where the same civilizational epic repeats, albeit with different symbols and values.

Alexandria. Yes, Hellenic, Greek, Latin, medieval, Arab, Islamic Alexandria, Sufi nook.

And which lover of the classical world doesn’t love Alexandria? This city distinguished by its own geographic fate, a fate unshared by any other city on earth. It is the only global city on the edge of three continents. It is a city named by Alexander the Great, one of the over seventy other cities he invaded, each falling before him, one after the other. He gave all of them the same name: Alexandria. All of these cities have been destroyed, have gone back to nature, and have been eaten away by forgetfulness, except for Alexandria, which has survived as stone, human geography, legend and a dynamic text that has played central roles in the history of global and western consciousness. From the era of the museum, to the seventy translators who changed religious discourse by bringing the ancient Semitic

24 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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