Abdel Wahab Bayati; Leading Arabic Poet

Abdel Wahab Bayati, an Iraqi writer considered to be one of the finest contemporary Arabic poets, died Tuesday of a heart attack in Damascus. He was 73.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency, which reported his death, gave no further details, but friends said he had been taken to a hospital after an asthma attack.

Syrian officials said a funeral ceremony will be held for Bayati today in Damascus. They said his family--he is survived by his wife and a daughter--has yet to decide whether he will be buried in Syria or taken to Iraq.

Ali Oqala Orsan, head of the Syria-based Arab Writers Federation, described Bayati as “a pioneer of Arab modern poetry.”

“His innovation will continue to shine in our lives,” Orsan said.

Bayati was one of the first Arab poets to break away from the classical forms of poetry that had prevailed in Iraq for centuries.

In 1950, his first collection, “Angels and Devils,” was published in Beirut. That collection and a later work, “The Broken Jugs,” are considered to have launched Arab poetry’s modernist movement.

His work was not translated into English until 1991, with the collection “Love, Death & Exile.” It was made up of 51 poems taken from eight different volumes published between 1969 and 1989. The tone of the poems reflects the overall melancholy Bayati felt about his homeland.

In a life spent mainly in exile, Bayati had lived in Damascus since 1996. Previously he lived in Jordan, where he had sought refuge after condemning Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

He was stripped of his citizenship by the Baghdad government in 1995 after he visited Saudi Arabia to participate in the Janadirya Heritage and Cultural Festival.

Bayati started his career as a teacher after graduating from Baghdad University in 1950, but was soon dismissed for participating in a leftist political demonstration.

“The government was stupid,” he said. “Instead of putting me in the cage, they put me out of it, thus opening the whole world for me to see.”

In 1954, he went into exile, first to Syria and then to the Soviet Union and Egypt. He returned to Iraq after the 1958 anti-monarchy coup and worked at the Ministry of Education to support his writing. He later taught at the Soviet University in Baghdad but fled to Cairo in 1964. It was there that he wrote “Lament for the June Sun,” a poem that obliquely damned Arab leaders who had let down the Arab people by leading them into the June 1967 war with Israel.

The poem, which was banned in Egypt, became something of an underground classic after it was published in Lebanon. When Bayati would travel to Arab countries in later years, people would bring him hand-copied versions of the poem and express how much it meant to them.

He moved back to Baghdad after a 1968 coup and served as an advisor to Iraq’s Ministry of Culture, while continuing to write poetry, drama and criticism. In 1980, Saddam Hussein assigned him to Iraq’s mission in Madrid as cultural attache.

In 1990, Bayati returned home just months before his daughter, Nadia, 32, died of a heart attack in California.

Bayati described his years of exile as a “tormenting experience” that affected his poetry and writings.

“I always dream at night that I am in Iraq and hear its heart beating and smell its fragrance carried by the wind, especially after midnight when it’s quiet,” he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Conversation of a Stone

A stone said to another:

I am not happy in this naked fence

My place is in the palace of the sultan

The other said:

You are sentenced to death

Whether you are here or in the sultan’s palace

Tomorrow this palace will be destroyed

As well as this fence

By an order from the sultan’s men

To repeat their game from the beginning

And to exchange their masks

From “Love, Exile & Death” by Abdul Wahab Bayati (Georgetown University Press), translated from the Arabic by Bassam K. Frangieh.