Mehmet Hakkı Suçin

Years ago, when one of my students asked me, “Professor, does the East have a work on the level of The Little Prince?”, I was taken aback at first, then made a quick search in my mind. Just as I was about to say I didn’t know, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet came to mind, and I recommended the book to my student. The question took me back to my years as a university student. Those were the years when I was trying to understand Gibran’s stories with my halting Arabic. I read The Prophet in Aytunç Altındal’s Turkish translation. I was enchanted. You cannot imagine how much I envied the translator. In the months that followed I also had the chance to read The Prophet in its Arabic translations. Then a copy of the original English text came into my hands. This time my adventure of reading it in English began, and it lasted for months. Something seemed to be missing in the translations, and from time to time the dream that perhaps one day I too would translate it gnawed at me. With this translation, in a sense, I have made my dream come true.

This personal journey of reading and translation inevitably led me to think more closely about the person behind The Prophet, that is, Kahlil Gibran. Without knowing Gibran’s life, it is impossible to grasp at what cost the serenity, longing and universal human call of this text were built. So, on the threshold of the door that opens onto The Prophet, it is useful first to take a brief look at Gibran’s life, the places that shaped him, and the long journey that carried him to The Prophet.

Kahlil Gibran (known in Arabic as Jubran Khalil Jubran) was born on 6 January 1883 in the village of Bsharri in northern Lebanon. At the age of twelve he emigrated to the United States with his mother, two sisters and a brother. After the family settled in Boston, Gibran returned to Lebanon to complete his education. In 1902 he went back to the United States and never returned to his homeland again. During this time three of the four members of the family had died of tuberculosis. Only his sister Marianna survived.

His interest in poetry and painting began in his school years. When he was about twenty-two, a Boston photographer who had discovered his talent organised the first exhibition of his drawings. This exhibition was followed by one at the Cambridge School, organised by Mary Haskell, owner and headmistress of the school and Gibran’s confidante, friend and patron. At that time he was writing for an Arabic-language newspaper published in Boston. In 1905 his first book, al-Musiqa (Music), was published. It was followed by ʿAraʾis al-Muruj (Nymphs of the Valley), in which he sharply criticised the church and the state. In 1908 came the story collection al-Arwah al-Mutamarrida (Spirits Rebellious), in which he voiced his revolt against the established order.

He spent the next two years studying art at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, with Mary Haskell’s support. In Paris he met the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who compared Gibran’s work with that of William Blake. Indeed, traces of both can be found in Gibran’s paintings, and Blake’s influence is evident in his writing. While in Paris he drew portraits of many celebrities, among them the sculptor Rodin, the composer Claude Debussy, the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the poet W. B. Yeats.

After returning to the United States, encouraged by other Lebanese émigré writers, above all Ameen Rihani, Gibran moved to New York in 1912 and rented a studio apartment he called “the Hermitage”. That same year his semi-autobiographical novel of unrequited love, al-Ajniha al-Mutakassira (The Broken Wings), was published, followed in 1914 by Damʿa wa-Ibtisama (A Tear and a Smile), a collection of his prose poems. Around this time he began corresponding with May Ziadeh, a Palestinian living in Egypt, and the love that grew between them, though they never met, lasted twenty years until Gibran’s death.

Gibran’s The Madman, nourished by Sufism and deconstructing the existing order, was published in 1918. It was his first work written in English. Before writing his second English book in a similar vein, The Forerunner, he wrote the Arabic books al-Mawakib (The Processions) and al-ʿAwasif (The Tempests). He also published a selection of his pictures, Twenty Drawings.

Some time later, together with other émigré literary friends, above all his close friend Mikhail Naimy, he founded the group al-Rabita al-Qalamiyya (The Pen League). Through the activities of this group, the émigré Arabic literature known in the United States as al-Mahjar became institutionalised and, crossing the borders of the United States, began to influence Arabic literature in the East as well.

In 1921 his only play, Iram Dhat al-ʿImad (Iram of the Pillars), which deals with the Sufi idea of the unity of being, was published. It was followed in 1923 by al-Badaʾiʿ wa’l-Tara’if (Beautiful and Rare Sayings), which, however, was overshadowed by The Prophet, published the same year.

The Prophet made Gibran known all over the world. After this book, despite his steadily worsening health, he managed to complete his other books: Sand and Foam (1926), Jesus, the Son of Man (1928), The Earth Gods (1931) and The Wanderer (1932).

Under treatment for cirrhosis, Kahlil Gibran died on 10 April 1931 at the age of forty-eight. In accordance with his wishes, his body was buried in Bsharri. The Garden of the Prophet, which he had completed shortly before his death, was published in 1933.

In one of his letters to May Ziadeh, Gibran speaks of how The Prophet came into being: “As for The Prophet, it is a book I thought of writing a thousand years ago, but I did not put any of its chapters on paper until the end of last year. What can I tell you about The Prophet? It is my rebirth and my first baptism. It is the only thought of mine that deserves to stand in the light of the sun, for it had written me before I tried to write it; it had created me before I created it.”

After the book was published, Gibran wrote to May: “This book is only a small part of what I have seen and continue to see every day – a tiny part of the many things in people’s silent hearts and souls that long to be expressed.”

Mary Haskell, who had always supported Gibran in his career as a writer and painter, also wrote these lines to him after receiving a copy of The Prophet: “Dear Kahlil, The Prophet came today, and it did more than fulfil my hopes. It seemed to recreate in its own light the universe pent up inside me and to open new doors of desire and imagination. So I read it as the centre of all presences. The form is magnificent: it lets thought and line flow without hindrance. The pictures make my heart leap. Breathtaking! On the whole I like the style of the book. As for the text, it is more beautiful, closer, clearer and more wonderful than ever in expressing reality and sweetening consciousness. The English, the style, the manner, the expression and the music are perfect. Kahlil, the book is beautiful in every way… This book will be held a masterpiece of English literature, and we will open it in our darkness to find ourselves again, and the heaven within us, and the world. Generations will not exhaust it; rather, generation after generation will find in it what they seek, and it will be loved more as people mature. It is the most loving book ever written, for you are the greatest lover among those who write.” (The letters are rendered here from the Turkish.)

The story of The Prophet is quite simple. The book opens with the story of Almustafa, “the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day”, leaving the city of Orphalese after twelve years, as the ship that is to carry him back to the isle of his birth arrives. When the people of Orphalese hear that he is leaving, they flock to him and beg him not to go, but the Prophet is determined. Then a seeress named Almitra says to him: “Prophet of God, in quest of the uttermost, long have you searched the distances for your ship. And now your ship has come, and you must needs go. Deep is your longing for the land of your memories and the dwelling place of your greater desires; and our love would not bind you nor our needs hold you. Yet this we ask ere you leave us, that you speak to us and give us of your truth.” The Prophet answers: “People of Orphalese, of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving within your souls?” Almitra goes on: “Speak to us of Love.” After giving wise answers to the people of Orphalese on this and other subjects, Almustafa boards the ship waiting for him and disappears into the mist.

Some critics draw a parallel between this book and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both books have a hero who reaches the level of a prophet or sage: Almustafa and Zarathustra. Yet this resemblance remains a formal and dramatic kinship rather than an intellectual affinity. While Zarathustra aims at the revolutionary and destructive re-creation of everything established in society, Almustafa points to man’s perfection through the philosophy of the unity of being, which dissolves being in what lies beyond being and lets man become one with “that supreme divine essence”. In Nietzsche compassion is often seen as a sign of weakness, whereas in The Prophet it is presented as one of man’s highest virtues. In this respect Almustafa represents not a Nietzschean rupture but a mystical and reconciling continuity.

This mystical and reconciling orientation finds its counterpart in the text in the style. The poetic quality of its style is what most distinguishes The Prophet from prose. Gibran writes here neither poetry in the full sense nor prose in the classical sense. Between the two he builds a prose-poetry with blurred boundaries but extraordinary power. In the Turkish translation particular care has been taken to preserve this expression, built on a poetic threshold, at the level of rhythm, sound and density. In this way the text strives to live on in Turkish not only on the intellectual but also on the aesthetic plane.

On the aesthetic plane this unity is clearly visible in the illustrations Gibran himself drew for The Prophet. Most of the drawings in the book take shape around the human body. Yet these bodies have a symbolic wholeness rather than anatomical accuracy. Elongated torsos, disproportionate limbs and indeterminate facial expressions deliberately avoid fixing the figures to a particular time or culture. The state of motion frequently seen in the drawings (figures walking, bending or reaching forward) complements visually the idea of journey and transformation that is central to the text. This movement can be associated with the Sufi notion of sayr wa suluk, the spiritual journey: man is not a fixed being but a traveller whose state is constantly changing. In precisely this context, the nudity in Gibran’s pictures has no erotic or provocative purpose; it is a metaphysical language symbolising contact with the essence, stripped of social and dogmatic shells. The body is not the opposite of the soul but its visible form. The naked figure represents the soul’s unmediated contact with truth. Bodies leaning on one another or merging suggest not carnal desire but the mystical union of human with human and of human with the divine.

This understanding converges with William Blake’s visionary conception of the body, with the Platonic and Neoplatonic idea of the unity of soul and body, and with the Eastern mystical concept of kashf (the lifting of the veil). Gibran, however, consciously keeps away from Blake’s dense mythological references. His lines are simpler, quieter and more inward. This simplicity parallels the plainness of the language of The Prophet. Where the word falls silent the line speaks, and where the line stops the reader’s inner voice comes in. Text and image thus form a single aesthetic and intellectual whole that transcends the body and makes love, unity and truth visible.

It is not surprising that such a poetic, cross-genre style has met with great interest all over the world, above all in the United States. We are talking about a book that has been translated into more than a hundred languages, whose American edition alone has sold more than ten million copies, and which has reached millions of readers worldwide. Gibran himself says: “The work has been received with interest far greater than I could ever have imagined by everyone, from President Wilson of America, the greatest English poets, the best-known French writers and Gandhi of India to the humblest workers, women and mothers. At times I feel ashamed before this interest and sympathy.”

In a time when oppression, injustice and terror roam freely and humanity stands on the brink of total madness, may The Prophet be an occasion for people today to “come to their senses”.

A taste

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Translated from the Turkish for this site.