This poem is made up of five movements, each with a subtitle. It was published in 1968 in the collection Al-Masrah wa’l-Maraya (Theater and Mirrors), in which the poet attempts polyphonic lyricism. Adonis has always been preoccupied with the relationship of the individual to the group, of individualism in relation to the collectivity. Lyricism, on the whole, represents a single voice, but in this collection the dramatic and reflective dimensions add nuances to the single voice; and in some of his poems in this collection, there are different voices and a chorus.
In A Mirror to Khalida, Adonis opts for a musical structure—one in which there is development but also point and counterpoint. “Mirror” in the title draws the reader’s attention to reflection and mimesis, thus evoking indirectly issues of representation that have preoccupied generations of philosophers and critics from Plato to Erich Auerbach.
Khalida is the name of the poet’s wife and companion since the mid-1950s. Their relationship goes beyond the conjugal bond to cover intellectual and aesthetic correspondence. Khalida Said (born in 1932), whom Adonis met when he was studying at the University of Damascus, has written extensively and persuasively on the Adonisian poetics. Her name means “eternal” (the feminine form of the adjective). Especially in this poem, the female figure takes on a semimythical presence, combining the absolute and eternal with fertility.
In part 1, entitled “The Wave,” the poet characterizes Khalida’s fluidity, movement, and paradoxical nature. Her sorrow is mixed with hope, “sadness around which / the branches burgeon.” This part touches on the Sufi and surrealistic inclinations of Adonis, where opposites meet and where the multiple is the expression of one. The lesson Khalida (as a person and as the eternal feminine) taught the poet is condensed in the following lines: “. . . the light / of the stars, / the face of the clouds, / the moaning of dust / are but one blossom.”
Part 2, “Under the Water,” is a prelude to the union of the lovers. Having characterized Khalida as a wave, “Water” seems both appropriate and suggestive. The imagery of nocturnal sleep, the dissolution of the night, and the singing of the blood evoke eroticism.
What is implicit here becomes explicit in part 3, “Lost,” where the erotic encounter enlists the language of conquest: the lips are a “fortress,” the hands “herald of an army,” and yet the conquered and the conqueror enter together the “forest of fire.” Both the rhythm and the alliteration employed in the Jayyusi translation evoke the poetics of the original with its musical rhyme scheme.
Part 4, “Weariness,” and part 5, “Death,” are counterpointed as a finale, following a climactic moment. Exhaustion proliferates and then disappears. In part 2 as well as in part 4, the pronoun used is we, while in part 3, the I is both contrasted and integrated with the you in a dramatic war dance. As if to block the spectators from viewing the action that moments before was on stage, part 5 draws the curtain across the scene of pleasure. Everything in part 5 grows old, including the bed and the pillow. The fire itself is extinguished.
While the finale picks up the imagery of part 2, it also goes beyond the erotic sense of dying and touches on the interplay between the temporal and the eternal. One is pitted against the other—the tension between the beauty of the moment, which culminates in an unspeakable bliss verging on the absolute, and the eventual erosion of such moments.
This love poem thus has a philosophical lining where the eternal and the absolute are juxtaposed to the temporal and the ephemeral. Using Khalida as the main figure, Adonis succeeds in invoking the real and what is beyond. The name is both a person and a symbol.
Bibliography
Adonis. “Miratun li-Khalida.” In Al-Masrah wa’l-Maraya. Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1968, 224–227.
Adunis (‘Ali Ahmad Sa‘id). “A Mirror to Khalida.” Translated by Lena Jayyusi and John Heath-Stubbs. In Modern Arabic Poetry, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature
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