Songs of an Eastern Humanist E-Book

Edward Said

• Herausgeber: ERIS
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 28

Beschreibung

"Considering the emphasis in Said's critical work on space and place and the political importance of geography, it is less surprising to see the luxuriant evocation of a specific topography of dusty roads, grottos, plump figtrees, desert flowers, muddy clods, and the 'beckoning hands of lambent hills'. Most revealing of all, perhaps, is the poems' tendency to see the world through musical form. Musical imagery is everywhere, testifying to how much of Said's mind in an introspective mood was immersed in the sounds, forms, and fables of Western classical music."—Timothy Brennan, from the book's Introduction Edward Said was renowned for the breadth, erudition, and humanity of his scholarly and political writing. His ground-breaking studies of literature and culture threw a dazzling new light on the ways in which non-Western peoples have been misrepresented over the course of the centuries, and he was among the world's most prominent voices in denouncing the modern-day injustices of Western foreign policy. This volume collects all of his never-before-published poems, offering insight into the personality of the author of Orientalism, The World, the Text and the Critic, and Culture & Imperialism "to a degree hidden in those works themselves". The nineteen works collected in Songs of an Eastern Humanist canvass a variety of poetic forms, but they are all shot through with Said's capacious intellect and passionate sensibility. They are also remarkable achievements of poetic craft. Said's poetry alternates with unerring judgment between wit and pathos, between sublimely elevated and disarmingly quotidian registers. His individual lines of verse are exquisitely constructed and richly elusive, while his poems as a whole are at once sweeping in their vision and keenly evocative of sensory experience. Their publication amounts to a major literary event, marking twenty years since the great public intellectual's passing.

Leseprobe

Songs of an Eastern Humanist

ERIS86–90 Paul Street265 Riverside Dr. #4GLondon EC2A 4NENew York, NY 10025

All rights reserved

Poems © The Estate of Edward W. Said 2023

Introduction © Timothy Brennan 2023

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

The right of Edward W. Said to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

ISBN : 978-1-916809-96-3

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Eris Press Ltd.

Contents

Introduction by Timothy Brennan

The Castle

“We have strayed into an ambience made edulcorate”

“An eager Levantine twilight swallows the sun”

“The early morning gently forges our city’s sounds”

Requiem

Desert Flowers

Vision’s Haze

“The finest hour of my life”

Old People of the Village

Wistful Music

“Windy corners and empty corridors”

Retrospect

A Celebration in Three Movements

Little Transformation

“One attention, one rapt century of feeling”

“The top of my heart flung its doors apart”

“We had cried together”

Hans von Bulow in Cairo

Song of an Eastern Humanist

Introduction

Poetry and music, not the prose for which he later became famous, pushed Edward Said towards the intellectual’s life. For many, this may seem surprising. At first glance, Said seems too driven by realism, social conflict, and narrative to bother with the obscure reveries of the inward gaze. On the rare occasions he wrote about poets (in “Yeats and Decolonization”, for example, or in his essays on Jonathan Swift) he focused on their fictional or non-fictional prose rather than their prosody. Most of his heroes—the ones to which he continually returns for inspiration—were essayists, satirists, and novelists, just as his favorite critics were theorists of the novel. To think of a typical Said essay on literature, we would likely go to his writing on Conrad’s Nostromo, Kipling’s Kim, Melville’s Moby-Dick, or the long tour de force chapter of Beginnings (1975), “The Novel as Beginning Intention”. Thinking of his comments on poetry, most would draw a blank.1

We forget that his literary critical idol as an undergraduate, R. P. Blackmur, primarily hung out with poets and built his classroom performances around reading their poems aloud, cigarette in hand. The particular themes to which Blackmur gave voice stressed the agonistic role of poetry in a scientific age, which may begin to explain why much of Said’s early teaching, most of his passing literary illustrations, and his own (largely private) creative writing were invested in poetry and not the novel at all. When Blackmur points to his most immediate predecessors and rivals, I. A. Richards and William Empson, he focuses on Richards’s Science and Poetry