Nizar Qabbani’s 1967 Letter To Gamal Abdel Nasser
“Whoever loves his country, Mr. President, purifies its wounds with alcohol, and with fire cauterizes—if need be—the areas that are wounded.”
“Whoever loves his country, Mr. President, purifies its wounds with alcohol, and with fire cauterizes—if need be—the areas that are wounded.”
The Summer 2020 issue of ArabLit Quarterly — our issue of summer insight & delight — is now available.
The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998) was one of the most popular Arabic-language poets of the twentieth century, well-known for his focus on eroticism and love. As Bassam Frangieh notes in his introduction to Arabian Love Poems, a collection of Qabbani’s work he co-translated with Clementina Brown, “To say that Kabbani was the most popular and famous of contemporary Arab poets is not to claim that he was the most skilled.”