I grew up between the pages of Youssef El-Sebai's novels. Khalil Gibran’s short stories haunted my teenage mind for weeks. I couldn’t put down Taha Hussein’s El-Ayam (The Days) or Naguib Mahfouz’s Bidaya wa Nihaya (A Beginning and an End). In high school, puzzled, I perused the works of some of the greatest Arab poets, such as Al-Mutanabbi and Antarah Ibn Shaddad.
At the same time, I was learning how to order at a restaurant in English, struggling with tenses and past participles, and confusing “so” with “too.”
Now, years, hundreds of flashcards, and a continent later, my English grammar and vocabulary notebooks have been superseded by Western classics from 19th- and 20th-century authors.
While I still underline new words and annotate complex structures, I now have the chance to directly absorb the thoughts, experiences, and stories of people from a different culture and time—in their own voices, through their own writing.
When I find myself in a library or bookstore, I almost absentmindedly gravitate toward the classics section. Sometimes crouched down, sometimes on tiptoes, but always overwhelmed and grateful, I browse the novels of increasingly familiar authors.
I picked up Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems. Although I have only read The Bell Jar and some of her poems, I can now recognize her unique style instantly. Plath has patterns. She employs the same words repeatedly throughout her work—brood, rook, fen, and marauder. Climactic questions end many of her stanzas, and counterintuitively, these inquiries tend to provide the final answer, painting the full picture. It is easy to see that Plath is a fan of alliteration. Her words often flow seamlessly, as in her titles “Tale of a Tub” and “Southern Sunrise.”
One poem I keep going back to is Winter Landscape, with Rooks. It is hard to articulate why I connect with one poem more than another, but I will try anyway. The first time I read it was the best time I read it. Oblivious to what lay ahead, I took in the description of the dark, hibernal landscape and the out-of-place, snow-white swan—only to realize, in the final lines, that the narrator is the rook and the bleak landscape mirrors her cold, broken heart. The enjambment (the continuation of a phrase from one line to another) makes reading this poem effortless and satisfying.
I am still working my way through The Collected Poems. In the meantime, I’ve picked up other classics such as Giovanni’s Room, Maurice, and The Woman in White, quenching my thirst for ideas and words written more than a century ago in a language I did not speak a decade ago.
New flashcards—this time of Italian words—are accumulating in my room. I still cannot confidently order in a restaurant or conjugate in all tenses, but I dream of the day I can pick up a classic Italian novel, because now, I learn a language for literature.
by Mohamed Chawki Mhadhab