Written by: François Xavier
Translated by: Ahmed Hamida
“Poetry, which is at the top of our signs, is in the end the only sign that does not accept separation and division, and by that I mean that its ambiguity… is often reduced to the benefit of another new perfection. I also mean that the sign as having a dual nature – as it lingers between heaviness and gentleness – is quickly erased when the hair grows, after it has secretly lightened its burden in favor of a winged presence… strictly winged.
How can the gentler defeat the heavier? I want to say here… that poetry establishes its absolute authority based on everything that is ambiguous, including time and place, and from that famous cry: “I don’t know” (Salah Stetieh).
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This citation, which may reduce Steti's vision to poetry, reveals to some extent an aspect of his unique perception of the tools of expression for his art. If Stetieh was a poet before he was a thinker, writer, and translator… and he had embraced diplomatic work, this means that he was in dire need of words for expression and disclosure. Therefore, we see that he chose poetry, that spiritual music that is dearest and closest to the ears of the heart, because in reality it was impossible for him to create anything else, and he was the one who always knew that thought – as Schiller pointed out – “must pass through words in order to return to thought.” ».
Salah Stetia is that amazing magician and researcher who, as he leads us to the garden of myths, tells us about the other, more pure side of us, that small part that remains hidden from us, because we do not know how to communicate with it, or even listen to it. This magic flows within us thanks to the insight and insight that resided in this man’s secret, which made him work, with precise writing… combined and eloquent, to bring together two different worlds and merge them to the point of fusion, the worlds of the East and the West. Thus, as a poet, he was able to breathe life into the demons that inhabited his poetry, and draw our attention to the splendor of the dream, in which the spiritual and the sensual coexist.
If Stetiya could have been just an idea, or gray smoke rising in the air, or a morning wind, he would undoubtedly have been the happiest of people. But this is not the case in the world of density, and it is not the case either for us, the simple readers, who are able to read and re-read his dreamy and humming verses, and those alchemical formulas of his flowering vocabulary, which, when combined, form… not a sentence, but rather a graceful image of a unique vision. Which was for this amazing narrator. indeed ! Stetiya's poetry has that suggestive energy that distinguishes major literary works. Whenever his words stop us, those words will soon be embedded in the depths of our beings, arousing our feelings and emotions. Should we see this as a sign of magic that possesses secrets? Or do you think he wants to show us that behind all the feelings expressed in poetry there is something else surprising and exciting?
A mediator between two cultures
In the beginning, there was an Eastern, Lebanese, meaning certainly a Phoenician, whose mother tongue, Arabic, and his religion, Islam, prompted him to write in French, in a circumstance that witnessed the growth of the idea of the Arab Renaissance, and through which every abandonment of the mother language began to be seen as a neglect of identity.
This reductive idea never crossed the poet's imagination. Rather, Stetieh worked on the contrary in order for both cultures, Western and Eastern, to be open to each other. When he took over the management of the “Literary Orient” magazine in Beirut during the sixties, he had already begun to play the role of mediator between these two cultures, so he took the initiative to write research and give lectures to inform the French public about the specificity of Arab imagination. On the other hand, he sought in Lebanon to preserve the tottering bridge that connected the West and the East from collapse, and to lay the foundations of a very worthy “Mediterranean” discourse based on authentic human values.
Stetieh was a political diplomat, but he was also a diplomat of hearts, as he was one of the few who worked to subjugate the temptation of the East, with its radiant cultural heritage, and spread it in the West. He was the only Arab intellectual who succeeded in writing in French about Arabism, which… Translators found great difficulty in revealing its truth to non-Arabs. Even if nothing equals the original, Stetieh has written for us in Arabic in a very eloquent French language, and with just such an addition, tomorrow we will be able to approach “the other burning and extremely pure side”: that is the title of his collection of poems published in 1992, which established his high status as a lofty scholar. Modern poetry.
The French Academy recognized this international recognition when it awarded him the “Grand Prix de la Francophonie” in 1995. Two symposiums were also devoted to him in 1996. But far from all that noise, Stetieh will remain a very humble and disappointed poet, very attached to Eastern values, humane to the utmost extent… and pleasant to be with, and he will remain steadfastly a man of dialogue who has understood poetry as A glimmer of hope that can profoundly change a person's vision of existence.
Pulsing music
At that time, Salah Stetiya wrote in a single language, that is, “French-Arabic,” which he created so that the music of his words would remain vibrant with all the images, sensations, and feelings contained in them. In addition to that, he created a special style of writing capable of generating the very specific rhythms and sounds of oriental narration. He was also able to tame the art of repetition without falling into elaboration and elaboration. Accordingly, his poetry became very flourishing and free of free metaphors.
This new writing, which was at the same time… charming, stable and unique, benefited from all the capabilities of the grammar of the language to generate charming Arabic decorations without being restricted by the familiar meters of poetry. From silence to screams, from metaphor to lyrical images, eloquence was formed by the brush of this poet, and kneaded to the point of completeness, until it became a satitic language, malleable and capable of poetic shaping and molding.
We see in Stetiya's poetry a constant keenness to combine the physical and the spiritual, as if each of them depended on its existence in a fixed way, if the other existed. However, the physical, which is mobile, always seems as if it does not stop opening up and trying to approach the spiritual in order to be lower than it, to the point that it seems to us that the poet yearns to capture the existence that surrounds him.
#Salah #Stetia. #Reading #side #silence
