Aviva BUTT

Salīm Barakāt’s Intermediary Existence: His Poem Maḥmūd Darwīsh

In January this year, with my first article on Salīm Barakāt, Empire, Split Ethnicities, and an Explosion of Poetry, I introduced Barakāt’s early writings saying that guidelines to understanding the poetry of the Kurdish poet Salīm Barakāt (b. 1951, Qamishli, Syria) are to be found in a poem by his friend, Palestinian poet Maḥmūd Darwīsh (b. 1941, al-Birweh, Palestine –d. 2008). I now present guidelines to understanding the mature output ofboth these poets guided by Barakāt’s poem “Maḥmūd Darwīsh” (1984 –2002). Barakāt’s multi-layered substantially surrealistic poem also serves as an ‘index to the acts of the wind.’ In the same period, Syrian Alevi poet Adūnīs (Ali Ahmad Said Esber, b. 1930) published his book al-Sūfiyya wal Surriyāliyya (Sufism and Surrealism) (Dar al-Saqi, 1995), and then his poem Fihris li-A‘māl al-Rīḥ(Index to the Acts of the Wind) (1998) exemplifying the theories of the book. I have included translations of salient whole poems.

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Books
Adonis. (1995), Trans. J. Cumberbach (2005). Sufism and Surrealism. London: Saqi.
Adūnīs.(1998). Fihris li-A‘māl al-Rīḥ. Beirut: Dār al-Nihār.
Barakāt, Salīm (2007). al-A’māl al-Shi‘riyah Salīm Barakāt. Beirut: Al-Mu’ssah lil-Dirāsāt wa-Nashr.
Butt, Aviva.(2013). Mahmud Darwish, Mysticism, and Qasidat al-Raml [The Poem of the Sand] in Poets from a War Torn World: Four Essays by Aviva Butt with Introduction by Reuven Snir, 8 –15. U.S.A.: Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.
Darwīsh, Maḥmūd (1986). Ward Aqall. Acre: Dār al-Aswār.
Darwīsh, Maḥmūd (2017) Dīwān Maḥmūd Darwīsh, 3 vols. Open library: Riyad El Rayes Books. Online: https://www.aldiwan.net/poem9102.html [Accessed 19 October, 2018].
Snir, Reuven.(2012). Adūnīs: MaftēaḥPeūlōt HaRūaḥ. Tel Aviv: Keshev.
Snir, Reuven.(2015). Maḥmūd Darwīsh: Hamīshīm Shenōt Shīrah. Tel Aviv: Keshev.
Zajonc, Arthur.(1995). Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind. Oxford University Press (paperback).
Articles
Esoteric Interpretations of theQur’an: The Foundations of Shia-Ismaili Tawil. Online: https://ismailignosis.com/2015/12/28/esoteric-interpretations-of-the-quran-the-foundations-of-shia-ismaili-tawil/ posted on December 28, 2015 by Ismaili Gnostic. [Accessed 1 October 2018]
Butt, A. (2018). Empire, Split Ethnicities, and an Explosion of Poetry. International Journal of Kurdish Studies 4(1), 44 –69, DOI:http://ijoks.com/ DOI: 10.21600/ijoks.383376 .
Butt, Aviva (2018). Sacred Texts and the Arabic Poetry of Mahmud Darwish. Archiv orientální 86, 53 –72. Prague: Oriental Institute (CAS). Online: http://aror.orient.cas.cz/
Butt, A. (2018). The Unimaginative Symbols of Salim Barakat. International Journal of Kurdish Studies 4 (2), 294–308. doi:10.21600/ijoks.454197http://ijoks.com/DOI: 10.21600/ijoks.454197