Almost everything Gibran wrote has been published. To find something unpublished you have to go to the letters — or, occasionally, to a bookseller's catalogue. In 2004 a four-stanza autograph poem from Barbara Young's collection came up for sale in New York.
By Francesco Medici
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KAHLIL GIBRAN COLLECTIVE
By Francesco Medici · Kahlil Gibran Collective · 2019 · kahlilgibran.com
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I
As of today, Gibran's literary works in both Arabic and English have all but been published, apart perhaps from some fragments and minor contributions. To find unpublished material we must look above all at his many letters.1 His extensive correspondence with Mary Haskell Minis, from 1904 until his death in 1931, together with her private journals and diaries about him, is still waiting to be published in full. Those documents form part of the Minis Family Papers, 1739–1948, held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which also contains Mary's correspondence and various materials about Gibran — manuscripts, writings, sketches and prints of sketches by him, photographs of him, and one corrected typed copy of "The Broken Wings, or a Chapter from a Spiritual Biography," an English self-translation of his Arabic novella al-Ajnihah al-Mutakassirah,2 which he gave her in January 1912.
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II
In 2004, James Cummins Bookseller of 699 Madison Avenue, New York, put up for sale at $8,000 an untitled and undated "autograph manuscript poem of four stanzas, approximately 22 lines" by Kahlil Gibran, from the Barbara Young collection.3 Written in ink on laid paper, it shows several deletions and a few words inserted in pencil, possibly in Barbara Young's own hand. What follows is a transcription; the title has been supplied only as an indication.
[Today Even As Yesterday]
Today, the sun is in the sky
Even as yesterday
And the birds sing ceaselessly in the forest
Yet lightless is my day and songless.
Even as yesterday
The wind dances upon the hills
And the bay trees and the lilies
Melt tenderly into space
Yet breathless is my day and scentless.
Today, my heart throbs
Even as yesterday
Yet here it lies in a coffin as dead.
The hours beat the muffled drums
And memory, half dumb,
Speaks the funeral oration.
And regret is digging the grave.
O love, you who walk the earth in search of life
Lay your hand again upon my heart
And say it is not dead.
Disperse these mourners
And let me rise again
To walk with you
Even as yesterday.
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1 A great number of his letters to American addressees has been collected by Salim Mujais, editor of Letters of Kahlil Gibran to Josephine Peabody (Beirut: Kutub, 2009); The Face of the Prophet: Kahlil Gibran and the Portraits of the Temple of Arts (Beirut: Kutub, 2011); and Letters from Kahlil Gibran to Gertrude Barry (Beirut: Kutub, 2013). ↩
2 Cf. al-Ajnihah al-Mutakassirah (New York: Mir'at al-Gharb, 1912). ↩
3 Cf. James Cummins Bookseller's Catalogue 90, pp. 20–22 (no. 39): "10 x 7½ inches; mounted on black paper backing sheet, framed to 13 x 9½ inches overall, n.p., n.d. Old folds, some chipping and splits to top and right margins not affecting text. Docketed in another hand in lower mat margin, 'A manuscript from Kahil Gibran's / From Barbara Young Collection'." ↩
This article is based on an excerpt from "Tracing Gibran's Footsteps: Unpublished and Rare Material," in Gibran in the 21st Century: Lebanon's Message to the World, edited by H. Zoghaib and M. Rihani (Beirut: Center for Lebanese Heritage, LAU, 2018), pp. 93–145.
All Rights Reserved © Copyright Francesco Medici 2019
