مقدمة

Introduction

(More than thirty-six years have passed since this was written)

The word is a responsibility: so our upright faith has taught us, and so the reality of life has impressed upon us. It is a responsibility when it breaks loose from the tether of the tongue, and it grows heavier and greater when it is set down on paper and published to be read. For the written word has an effect on the reader, for good or ill, and so on the society that stands behind him. Nor does the burden of this effect fall on the writer alone, whether poet or prose writer; it is a shared responsibility, divided between reader and writer, or, if you will, between creator and recipient.

If the creator’s responsibility is plain and evident, since he is the root cause of bringing this art into being and setting its effect in motion, the recipient in turn has his share in shaping that effect; for he receives the word according to his culture, his surroundings, his ideas, his inclinations and all that he was raised on. Many a saying delights one group of readers and angers another, and the reverse is also true. To the suggestion that a word carries within it, in its rhythm and in its place, the reader adds a suggestion of his own; and from the two together a meaning is born that belongs to him alone: it may delight him, or grieve him, or anger him.

How often a word has been taken in a sense other than its true one, so that the reaction ran exactly counter to the direction the writer intended or wished to trace. That is why no writer can ever please everyone: disagreement over what a person says and writes is bound to arise, and there is no doubt that feelings will swing between admiration and esteem on the one hand, and disgust and aversion on the other.

Among the highest kinds of speech, in my estimation, is poetry; and that is why its audience, its devotees and those who excel in it have always been few. It is like the diamond among minerals: none but the rich acquire it, and none savour it, feel it and respond to it but those rich in thought and mind, created with a refined sensibility and a keen perception.

Poetry is a composition of meaning, rhythm and suggestion that invades the senses before the mind, and stirs the heart and the emotions. None can endure its labours but one granted the stamina to dig its mine and bring out its treasures. It is an unbridled imagination, with something at times of a transparent obscurity; yet it gives you the truth in the most splendid mould, by way of that very imagination.

As for this collection of poems, with which I step forward onto the Arabic literary scene and introduce myself to the Arab reader, it is part of the harvest of five years. At least half of its poems were lost, and that was when I fell captive to love. I have also held back a large number that do not suit the nature of the collection, on subjects that do not fall under the banner of love: religious, patriotic and Arab-nationalist. I have chosen that this collection should be, as a whole, something like a complete symphony, playing the melody of a living experience that I truly lived within the realms of love: its sweet and its bitter, its delight and its torment. And I do not lie if I say that I am living it still, to this day.

As for the collection’s name, Eternal Fragrance,¹ its story, its purport and its meaning are a secret between me and the one to whom I addressed these poems, and then between me and whichever reader perceives it after that. In any case, this collection is no more than the first stage and the first step on the road of literature. It remains for me to say that, just as no writer or poet is ever wholly satisfied with his work, I am not satisfied with the standard of this collection, even though I prefer its poems to all the poetry I have composed so far.

Mohamed Al Amin Mohamed Al Hadi

Jeddah, 7 March 1990

English translation prepared by artificial intelligence and reviewed against the Arabic for accuracy of meaning and rhetoric.