Customer Reviews

Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems.

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Bernard Lewis is probably the West's foremost scholar on Islam and the Middle East; I have enjoyed several of his books on these topics. Even so, I was surprised to find a volume of poetry, translated by Lewis, at my bookstore, and I bought it immediately, reasoning that if it remotely approached his other works, it would be well worth the money. I was not disappointed. With little or no knowledge of Near Eastern poetry to my credit, Music of a Distant Drum won me over. I read the entire volume of poems, about 130, in the first evening.

Music of a Distant Drum is divided into four sections of approximately equal lengths, each providing poems, translated by Lewis, from four distinct (although sometimes contemporaneous) cultures: Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew. While I?m qualified to critique neither the poetry nor its translation, I can say that I found them all beautiful. Not knowing what to expect, I was surprised by the brevity of many of the works. The Persians and Arabs in particular seem to be fond of short works in tight stanzas. Too, I found the worldliness and circumspection of the Persians unexpected, even though they, among all four cultures, seemed most fond of metaphor.

If you are a student of the East, I think you might be interested in, and surprised by, the topics these poems: war, love, aging, politics, drinking (!). Some scholars note that drinking (or drunkenness), as a topic in this poetry, is a metaphor for an all-encompassing love of God. Lewis seems to suggest that the drinking references may not be as metaphorical as others maintain it is. Either way, the poetry is agile and moving, and I enjoyed it very much. Poetry lovers may appreciate that some of these works have probably never appeared in print in the West, and I was impressed by the very number of poets represented: there are an astonishing 54 mini-biographies (about a paragraph, each) in the back of the book.

Buy this book and read it. I believe you will find it as powerful and enjoyable as I did.

Excellent book, but we all knew this. Better great customer service from the provider of a signed copy is superb condition. You have to love those who love and care for good books.

A great Amazon vendor.

I have been reading Rumi and Hafiz for several years. This lovely collection opens more doors to a culture that values and continues to cherish poetry. I really like the choice of Poets which includes Turkish and Hebrew Writers. This little book is a great travel companion.

Music of a Distant Drum builds on the fascination with alterity and the special dialectics it heralds. It is an attept at a poetical confluence of genres and styles. Not unsignificant is its ethos, the intensity of the lyric athmosphere, rich in decorations and sweetened by heavy words.

While Bernard Lewis's book is commandable by its beauty and novelty, it is rather a door towards outside (European eroticism) and not one in (any given Middle Eastern culture). An Orientalist agenda (Edward Said, 1979) is easily seen as the reader is given a pastiche of 'Oriental' feelings, designed to portray and represent an ideal space.

Ironically for Lewis, these poems, collected and suspended between 'The East' and 'The West', rather than being an ethnogrsphy of anything, form, in themselves a '-scape' (Appadurai, 1996) that is valuable in itself, beyond the myth of authenticity.

For me, this poeto-mantia has the special charm of things that disrupt order, proposing a switch of the gear, from the highly implosive experiences of electronic mediation of my work to the exploded linearity and discretness of this poetic thread (McLuhan, 1964). The thrill comes, of course, when applying this linear pressure onto eroticism, particularily then when genders are blurred through the inevitable thickness of translation.

Indeed, any way you see it, this book is a very pleasant adventure through the imaginary chamers of Oriental eros.

AP, May, 2010