Nizar Kabbani - A Man who Transforms you into Poetry
When you find a man
Who transforms
Every part of you
Into poetry,
Who makes each one of your hairs
Into a poem,
When you find a man,
Capable,
As I am
Of bathing and adorning you
With poetry,
I will beg you
To follow him without hesitation,
It is not important
That you belong to me or him
But that you belong to poetry.
Nizar Kabbani - A Man who Transforms you into Poetry
Translation by Bassam K. Frangieh
and Clementina R. Brown
Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Why a man and not a woman? Clearly it is about belonging to a man. Hmmm.
Note the last lines, "... it is not important that you belong to me or him, but that you belong to poetry". My personal interpretation or feeling about this poem is that the author is saying it's important to follow whatever inspires you and transforms you into what you want to be. He says "a man" but I think the real message is - be inspired! be transformed!
Here's a thought: Transform yourself into god damn poetry and stop waiting for a man to come along and do it for you.
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Actually, I was thinking about this poem and how I feel like it applies to my boyfriend. The gender specifications do in some ways limit the poem, yet as PoetryGrrrl stated the final line's meaning doesn't change if the bearer of poetry be male or female.
Nizar Kabbani is a man, PoetryGrrrl.
where are you???????
The picture I chose may not conform to the image that you have in your head when you read this poem, but from my perspective, when seen through the filter of my own experiences and imagination, this picture was the best and most logical choice to go with this poem.
I chose this picture to go with this poem for a few reasons. I chose an image with a book instead of a man because I don't believe you need a man to inspire you. That's not to say that a man can't inspire you, but I disagree with the idea that women can only be inspired by men. I myself am more inspired by literature than by men, so I chose to go with a picture of a girl and a book instead. The girl in the picture is reading intensely (poetry?), and reading always inspires me. The mirror, to me, symbolizes the magic of literature - pick up a book or read some poetry, and you can step into another world for a time. A good author - male or female, it doesn't matter - can transform you into an inhabitant of the world that they have woven for you. The girl in the picture is lost in her imagination with one hand through the looking glass, inspired by what she is reading.
I was also thinking of CS Lewis as the model of the "man who transforms me into poetry". I recently re-read his Chronicles of Narnia and I always feel like I have stepped through a magic doorway to another world when I read his work. In the books, there is an endless woods, where endless puddles (doorways to other worlds) exist. The mirror hanging in the air reminded me of this.
I have read this before and have always seen it as close to the opposite of the male/female ownership issue that everybody else seems to be getting from it. Instead, I read it as don't settle- don't settle for any man who doesn't make your life absolutely interesting and everything that it should be. You can't deny the basic human desire to couple off- he's saying that when you do that, be choosey.
I went to wiki to see what time period he wrote in and they had this to say about him:
When Qabbani was 15, his sister, who was 25 at the time, committed suicide because she refused to marry a man she did not love. During her funeral he decided to fight the social conditions he saw as causing her death. When asked whether he was a revolutionary, the poet answered: “Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy.” He is known as one of the most feminist and progressive intellectuals of his time.
Makes sense, I think this is at least partly FOR that sister.