In 2013 and 2014, Italian scholar Francesco Medici published two landmark works that brought Kahlil Gibran and his closest literary companion, Ameen Rihani, to Italian readers for the first time — cementing his reputation as the leading voice in Italian Gibran scholarship.
Kahlil Gibran Collective · 22 April 2014
Ameen Rihani (1876–1940) — whose masterwork The Book of Khalid was translated into Italian by Francesco Medici, with a foreword by Professor Suheil Bushrui.
Francesco Medici is a scholar, translator, and researcher from Bari, Italy — and the most accomplished translator of Kahlil Gibran's works in the Italian language. His translations include Gibran's plays Lazarus and His Beloved and The Blind, his celebrated The Prophet, and a number of lesser-known works. He is also a research producer on the documentary film Kahlil Gibran: The Reluctant Visionary, to which he has contributed years of archival research, rare documents, and scholarly analysis.
In 2013 and 2014, Medici published two significant works that expanded the Italian reader's understanding of both Gibran and the Arab-American literary world he inhabited.
Kahlil Gibran: Il Profeta e il Bambino (The Prophet and the Child), published by Editrice La Scuola, Brescia, 2013, is a collection of unpublished writings, testimonials, photographs, and illustrations — collected and edited by Medici — that reveals a side of Gibran rarely seen in Italian publication.
Ever since his lifetime, the figure of Gibran began to be identified with that of "the Prophet" — the central character of his most famous work — and to this day it remains difficult to distinguish the man from the myth. This anthology addresses that gap directly. Alongside rare and unpublished writings, it brings together a rich selection of testimonials and anecdotes never before published in Italian, revealing the lesser-known dimensions of Gibran's personality: his sense of humour, his playful spirit and lively curiosity, but also his emotional vulnerability and intimate fragility.
The volume concludes with tributes to Gibran by poets of the calibre of his compatriots Ameen Rihani and Mikhail Naimy, and Americans Corinne Roosevelt Robinson and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Kahlil Gibran: Il Profeta e il Bambino. Edited by Francesco Medici. Editrice La Scuola, Brescia, Italy, 2013.
The second publication is a landmark in Italian literary history: the first Italian translation of Ameen Rihani's masterpiece The Book of Khalid (1911) — Il Libro di Khalid — published by Mesogea, Messina, Italy, 2014, with the original illustrations by Kahlil Gibran, and a foreword by the late Professor Suheil Bushrui.
The Book of Khalid holds a unique place in the story of both Arab-American literature and Gibran's own development as a writer. Published in 1911, it was the first novel ever written in English by an Arab-American author — a philosophical, lyrical work that drew on Rihani's experience as a Lebanese immigrant navigating the New World, and that Gibran himself illustrated. Scholars have long noted the book's influence on The Prophet: its themes of spiritual searching, its prophet-like central voice, and its bridging of Eastern and Western thought all anticipate Gibran's 1923 masterpiece in striking ways.
Rihani (1876–1940) was Gibran's closest intellectual companion and one of the most significant Arab thinkers of the twentieth century. His friendship with Gibran — which began in Boston in 1909 and endured until Gibran's death in 1931 — was one of the most important relationships in either man's life. Bringing The Book of Khalid to Italian readers for the first time, with Gibran's original illustrations intact and a scholarly foreword by Professor Bushrui, is a significant act of cultural recovery.
Il Libro di Khalid. By Ameen Rihani. Translated and edited by Francesco Medici. Foreword by Suheil Bushrui. Mesogea, Messina, Italy, 2014. With original illustrations by Kahlil Gibran.
For more on Francesco Medici's scholarship and translations, see also our articles Arab Poets of the Diaspora and The Essential Rihani. For the English critical edition of The Book of Khalid, edited by Todd Fine, see our speakers page.
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