The Prophet E-Book

Kahlil Gibran

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

First published in 1923, The Prophet is a collection of twenty-six poetic fables that centre around the prophet Al Mustafa, who, boarding a boat in the city of Orphalese, where he has lived for many years, prepares to sail home. On the voyage Al Mustafa is approached by a group of travellers, with whom he discusses deep topics – love, friendship, passion, pain, religion – and The Prophet becomes a manual and spiritual guide. This edition features the original illustrations prepared by the author, as well as an introduction by Dr Daniele Nunziata, which introduces the great work for a new generation.

Leseprobe

The Prophet

kahlil gibran

with an introduction by

daniele nunziata

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

[email protected]

020 8050 2928

www.renardpress.com

The Prophet first published in 1923This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2022

Edited text © Renard Press Ltd, 2022Introduction © Daniele Nunziata, 2022

Cover design by Will Dady

Renard Press is proud to be a climate positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, used to train artificial intelligence systems or models, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the publisher.

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contents

Introduction

The Prophet

The Coming of the Ship

On Love

On Marriage

On Children

On Giving

On Eating and Drinking

On Work

On Joy and Sorrow

On Houses

On Clothes

On Buying and Selling

On Crime and Punishment

On Laws

On Freedom

On Reason and Passion

On Pain

On Self-Knowledge

On Teaching

On Friendship

On Talking

On Time

On Good and Evil

On Prayer

On Pleasure

On Beauty

On Religion

On Death

The Farewell

Note on the Text

introduction

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet was first published almost exactly one hundred years ago. A century later, it remains one of the most thought-provoking and innovativeinvestigations of the human psyche ever committed to print.

The Gibran Museum is located in Bsharri, a small village among the cedar-rich hilltops of Mount Lebanon where its most famous resident was born in 1883 and later buried in 1931. That the museum was once a monastery dedicated to Mar Sarkis (or Saint Sergius) is perhaps no coincidence: while the monastery offered safe sanctuary for travellers and refugees across centuries of colonial invasions, the current museum provides today’s visitors with a place to quietly contemplate the writing of a poet whose oeuvre is replete with questions of belonging and exile.

While Gibran is buried in his Lebanese birth town, the decades he spent working and living in New York City also helped inform the transnational quality of his work. Comparable to his life spent across two continents, Gibran’s unique literary and artistic choices cannot be neatly defined according to one simple category or another. Are we reading an entirely modern example of free verse; an intricately woven piece of wisdom literature, a genre with its origins in the ancient Middle East; or something distinctively in-between? It is this writerly innovation – used to represent one person’s pending movement across the seas – that made Gibran’s The Prophet immensely successful when it was originally published in the US in 1923 and has enabled it to endure for a century. The early- to mid-twentieth century saw mass migration and the movement of refugees on a scale the world had previously never known. The Prophet became a landmark in depicting the multifaceted impact of these movements on the psychology – and the soul – of an individual. For this reason, it has been translated into a least one hundred languages and become one of the most read pieces of literature ever published.

Written without any formal structure in terms of rhyme scheme or stanza length, The Prophet is a long poem which strays from the contemporary poetic conventions of both Lebanon and the US and from the wider Arabic and English language traditions of poetry with which Gibran was deeply familiar. It tells the story of its eponymous prophet, Al Mustafa. While waiting for a ship to transport him to the island of his birth, having spent twelve years living in the fictional city of Orphalese, he meditates on various philosophical and theological themes with a crowd of people that has gathered around the city gates – beginning with the subject of love. As the scholar Suheil B. Bushrui has shown, Gibran’s oeuvre covers the wide expanse of human experience, thereby expressing ‘the hope of future recompense for present wrongs, as well as being the process by which man is gradually perfected and assimilated into the Universal Soul.’1 Travel and migration enable Gibran to understand most acutely the modern human condition.

The original publication included Gibran’s own illustrations. The final image is a sketch of an outstretched hand with an eye in the middle, surrounded by concentric cloud circles made of human bodies and angelic wings. Combining the Hand of Fatima with a heavenly scene reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy, created in a style echoing that of the poet-artist William Blake, this image demonstrates the spiritual and cultural wealth of a work that crosses literary and artistic bounds in order to articulate what it means to be human. Growing up in a religiously diverse Mount Lebanon during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, Gibran’s thinking was inspired by various branches of Christianity and Islam, as well as the Baháʼí Faith and a range of esoteric practices. Raised as a Maronite Catholic, Gibran looked to both his upbringing in Bsharri and to the plurality of human religious expression – in both the Levant and the ever-growing megalopolis of New York – to contemplate our place in the world. The Prophet is the apotheosis of such contemplation: the poem is rich in aphorisms which seek to explain and unravel the webs of human knowledge that intersect across the planet and create the network of universal lived experience. As Al Mustafa declares to both his immediate audience within the poem and to the readers of the work beyond the page:

People of Orphalese, of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving within your souls?

The poem has an outlook which is both internal and external, simultaneously gazing pensively at the local and the international. The twelve years that Al Mustafa spent in Orphalese corresponds with the number of years that Gibran spent living in New York before publishing The Prophet. Although he first moved to the US with his mother and siblings in 1894, living within the large Lebanese-American community of the South End of Boston, Gibran permanently relocated to Manhattan in spring 1911. After moving to the city, his literary and artistic output increased dramatically. The exchanges between Al Mustafa and the citizens of Orphalese, who ‘were crying out to him as with one voice’, has an autobiographic resonance: the poem’s speaker appears to articulate the knowledge Gibran had acquired and finessed during his time in the metropolis. But to which ‘one voice’ is the speaker referring? After moving to New York, Gibran’s literary language switched almost exclusively from Arabic to English, beginning with the publication of his first Anglophone work in 1918, The Madman, His Parables and Poems.

This linguistic transition draws attention to the position of the English language in the early twentieth century: it was, and remains, a global language understood and read by millions across the world, but its pervasive spread across every continent was a consequence of the rise of the British Empire and American cultural imperialism. Perhaps the choice to compose The Prophet in English was intended to allow Gibran to speak directly to the majority-English-speaking New Yorkers he was living among; or perhaps it signals an attempt to create a literary work that would be easily published, circulated and consumed across an increasingly globalised world. Writing in his second language – and therefore writing in translation – raises questions about what is gained and lost by Gibran deciding not to publish widely in Arabic after the 1910s.

Nonetheless, The Prophet gains its powerful ability to speak universally not because it was first published in English but because Gibran masterfully combines his meticulous and thorough understanding of various strands of cultural and religious epistemologies in a work that celebrates the nuances of cultural exchange and diversity. His English verse is inspired by both contemporary and ancient Arabic poetic conventions, and his vision of the world eschews any narrow affiliation with one specific city, nation or region. As Terri DeYoung suggests, ‘Gibran often chose to revalue the canonical judgments of Western critical discourse’, while also embracing ‘a new sport of openness to hybridity’ by combining literary styles from both Arabic and English.2

Drawing on his lived experiences of New York, Gibran’s view of the city always celebrated his diasporic identity. He was a key figurehead in the Mahjar movement in which writers of Arabic-language literature and journalism in Boston and New York collaborated to produce cultural works. This included the formation of the Pen League society in the 1910s, of which Gibran was a chairman. He worked alongside other prolific writers of his generation, such as Elia Abu Madi and Ameen Rihani. While much scholarship has been dedicated to the ways in which Anglophone writers of the Modernism movement broke free from poetic conventions before and after the Great War, the Mahjar poets were just as innovative and influential in offering new avenues for poetic style and form. Synthesising Arabic- and English-language traditions and merging cultural practices from across continents, Gibran and his peers presented new ways of shaping verse which have transformed the global literary scene in immeasurable ways. This small literary society, composed mostly of Lebanese Americans and Syrian Americans living on the East Coast, achieved a literary legacy that spread far across the globe.

The Prophet is testament to the complexities and multivalences of migration and exile. The poem explores diasporic identity to demonstrate how wisdom is enriched by travel and the movement of people, cultures and ideas. Meditating on his identity while waiting to return overseas, Al Mustafa considers who he has become while residing in Orphalese:

Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets […]

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.