Shādhil Ṭāqah’s Elegy for Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb

Abstract

Abstract Iraqi poet and statesman Shādhil Ṭāqah (d. 1974) published an elegy in a 1965 issue of the Beirut journal al-Ādāb for fellow poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d. 1964) titled “Intiṣār Ayyūb” (Job’s Victory). This article attends to how the elegy’s content reflects the poet’s relationship with Sayyāb as well as how it pays homage to Sayyāb’s novel approach to Arabic prosody. Outside of one book-length study of Ṭāqah’s poetry by Bushrā al-Bustānī (2010) and the comments found at the end of Ṭāqah’s collected works edited by Saʿd al-Bazzāz (1977), his poetry has remained relatively unaddressed even in Arabic scholarship. The study thus introduces a key poem from this important but mostly forgotten poet to Anglophone readers while also situating Ṭāqah as a member in the coterie of modernists who became active during and following their time at the Baghdad Teachers College in the late 1940s, a group that included Ṭāqah, Sayyāb, Nāzik al-Malāʾikah (d. 2007), ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (d. 1999), and others. Overall, the article establishes Ṭāqah’s work within its Iraqi context as well as within the broader Arabic literary milieu of the 1960s in the Mashriq, situating Ṭāqah as an important contributor to the development of modernist Arabic poetry.