Tradition and Translation: Poetic Modernism in Beirut

This dissertation presents a reading of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that flourished in Beirut between 1955 and 1975. It explores how the poets and theorists of this group, centered around the magazine Shi'r, redefined the parameters of Arabic poetry through their multiple projects of translation [naql], whether of foreign texts or classical predecessors. This redefinition involved a variety of literary and institutional strategies, whose common goal was to win for poetry a measure of autonomy from the region's rapidly metastasizing states. At a time when post-colonial Arab regimes sought to establish control over their respective national cultures, modernist poets fought to secure a margin of independence. By analyzing the theory and practice of modernism in poetry, this study shows how the Arabic literary field was restructured according to a new, globalized conception of the relations between culture and politics.;The introduction lays out the historical context for this movement, arguing that it occurs at a moment of legitimation crisis for intellectuals across the Middle East. The first chapter narrates the movement's intellectual origins in the Social Syrian Nationalist Party. Looking at the life and writings of Yusuf al-Khal, editor-in-chief of Shi'r, it charts the modernists' move away from their political beginnings toward ideal of literary autonomy, mediated by the specifically Cold War figure of "man." Chapter two examines the Syrio-Lebanese poet Adonis' most important collection, The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, arguing that its melancholic apostrophes are the symptoms of a turn away from nationalist politics toward an international space of exile. The third chapter examines debates about the Arabic prose poem, particularly as it was practiced by Unsi al-Hajj, the form's most radical advocate. It pays especially close attention to al-Hajj's encounter with Antoine Artaud, read as a figure for the impossibility of translation. The final two chapters center on Adonis' work as an anthologist and elegist, the "internal translations" by which he fundamentally reconfigured the canons of Arabic poetry. The conclusion suggests that Arabic modernism is, in historical terms, a late modernism, a movement whose emergence coincides with its own institutionalization.