ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how a poem works in translation and the reasons behind its stance against Cold War politics. Ancient and modern Arabic lyrics can serve neatly to broach Arabic poetry and poetics. The modernist thrust was partly in dialogue with and also in opposition to the sentimentalism and romantic agony of the Egyptian Alī Maḥmūd Ṭāhā al-Muhandis and his peers in the Arab world who came to prominence before the end of World War II. Some examples in the history of Arab modernity can build up for a course or syllabus a cultural reservoir, and consolidate a comparative framework that looks upon poems as intersectional and thence intertextual spaces that are loaded with meaning and life, thus turning the classroom into a vibrant climatic environment. Al-Sayyab draws only elusively and allegorically in the prelude to his "Canticle of the Rain" on the pre-Islamic nostalgic prelude.
