About Our Kahlil Gibran Series
 Kahlil Gibran "With these newly translated works, we have been bestowed with a rare gift of poetry and grace." |
The Arab-American community and White Cloud Press are celebrating 100 years of Arab-American contributions to our nation's culture throughout 1995, highlighting Gibran's unique role as the leading representative of Arab-American literature. The University of Michigan's Center of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, with the Detroit Institute of Arts, ACCESS, an Arab Community Center in Dearborn, and the ADC chapter in Flint, are scheduling a series of events in southeastern Michigan for this Fall. From November 1st through December 31st, the Detroit Institute of Arts will host an exhibit of Kahlil Gibran's art work. The paintings are from the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences' collection, the most extensive collection of Gibran art work in the United States. During the course of the exhibition there will be a series of educational and cultural events, including readings from contemporary Arab American writers, music, and lectures and workshops on the work of Kahlil Gibran.
A major inspiration for the Gibran Centenary activities was the publication in 1994 and 1995 of four new translations of Gibran's Arabic writings by White Cloud Press of Ashland, Oregon. These titles (The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul; The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart; Spirit Brides; and The Storm) represent the first accurate and faithful translations of Gibran's Arabic writings. Translators for the White Cloud series are Juan Cole, director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, and John Walbridge, professor of Islamic thought and culture and Indiana University. These new translations have been hailed for their beauty and accuracy and they represent the first faithful translations of Gibran carried out by qualified scholars of Arabic literature. Earlier translations have been described by one Gibran scholar as "free and largely inaccurate."
Gibran's life story is as dramatic as his art and writings and are told in a new documentary by Canadian filmmaker Eliza Haddad. Ms. Haddad's film premiered during the Centenary activities in Detroit.
The Life of an Artist
Although Gibran's artistic talent was quickly spotted by social workers in Boston when he was only twelve years old, the immigrant network of Arab-Americans around him remained a prime social reference. It was for them that he wrote his prose poems and vignettes for Arabic journals, which were later collected in such books as A Tear and a Smile and The Storms, and Spirit Brides.
As Gibran became more comfortable with English, he began to write books in his second language. In this effort he was assisted by Mary Haskell, his patron, editor, and beloved friend. Still, he always felt more comfortable writing in Arabic and usually translated his Arabic drafts into English with the assistance of Mary Haskell. English-language works such as The Prophet, Jesus, Son of Man, and The Garden of the Prophet were written in this fashion.
American readers who have enjoyed The Prophet will be keenly interested in Gibran's earlier literary works both because they stand as eminently readable and because they show the development of Gibran's thought. Here, he expresses forthright anger and outrage about social injustice, combined with a steadfast faith in the perseverance of the human spirit, all in a style that is graceful, fresh, and natural. These narratives, which appeared during the same era that produced the social criticism of Jack London and Upton Sinclair, differ greatly from the sober and oracular works Gibran authored in English two decades later.
The writings published by White Cloud Press are also of contemporary interest in that many of Gibran's themes have come around again in popular culture. Gibran was one of the few spiritual writers in the early decades of this century to write on creation as an original blessing from God, on the feminine dimension of the divine, on the transcendental unity of religious experience, and on advocacy of religiously motivated civil disobedience later espoused by liberation theology and the civil rights movement.
Despite his Lebanese origins and the influence on him of Arabic literature, from A Thousand and One Nights to the Koran and the Arabic Bible, Gibran is a quintessentially American writer, a celebrator of the individual, of progress, of initiative. Like Whitman, Gibran combines his faith in progress with a love of nature, and his belief in the individual with a mystical pantheism.
His works have all the hallmarks of an immigrant literature--the feelings of alienation, of falling between two stools, of new possibilities and rebellion against old rigidities. His is a Horatio Alger story of ascent from the Boston slums near Chinatown to the chic galleries of New York's intelligentsia in the roaring Twenties. Such an ascent exacts a price. Gibran's troubles with the Maronite Catholic Church resulting from his modern, American anticlericalism are as old an immigrant story as the Pilgrims' problems with the Established English Church and as young a one as Salman Rushdie's difficulties with the ayatollahs. The immigrant finds it suddenly possible to experiment, not only with cultural forms, but also with values. Like Yeats, Gibran sought a pagan spirituality, engaged in meditative exercises, and believed in a vivid spirit world and in reincarnation. Gibran's rejection of organized religion and conventional morality while retaining an interest in spiritual growth is, again, very American.
As an immigrant writer, Gibran made lasting contributions to two cultures. His work continues to provide readers with insights into life's mysteries and possibilities.
The translators for this series are Juan R. I. Cole and John Walbridge. Juan Cole is director of the University of Michigan's Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and professor of modern Middle Eastern history. John Walbridge is professor of Middle Eastern culture and philosophy at Indiana University. Both translators have extensive experience in the Middle East, and both lived in Lebanon for a time.
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