In Remembrance: Salma Khadra Jayyusi

Abstract

The passing of Salma Khadra Jayyusi on April 20, 2023, is a tremendous loss for all of us who inherit the fruits of her work as a writer and tireless champion of Arabic literary culture. The extent of Jayyusi’s contribution to the literary landscape and to the dissemination of Arabic literature in translation in the West cannot be overstated. A poet, critic, translator, historian, and anthologist, she will be remembered as one of the Arab world’s most prominent literary scholars, whose poetic, analytic, and social intelligence are apparent in both her critical writings and her far-reaching initiatives to anthologize and expand the readership of Arabic letters. Born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, Jayyusi grew up in Akka and Jerusalem during British Mandate rule in Palestine. Her father was an activist, and Jayyusi was politically aware from a young age. Among many stories, she described deciding at the last minute to join a demonstration against the Zionists instead of attending school: “and soon enough, I was leading more demonstrations than the British police could tolerate.”1 Following her time at Schmidt’s Girls College in Jerusalem, she received her bachelor’s degree in English and Arabic literature in 1945 from the American University of Beirut. It was there that she met Burhan Jayyusi, whom she later married, and whose diplomatic career led them to live in numerous cities across the Middle East and Europe. Jayyusi described how her participation in the vibrant cultural scenes of Beirut and Baghdad during the 1950s and 1960s deepened and widened her knowledge of Arabic literature, and she published her first book, a collection of poetry titled Return from the Dreaming Fountain, in 1960. After receiving her PhD in Arabic literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1970, she turned her dissertation into a two-volume book titled Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, published in 1977, a meticulous study supported by an encyclopedic wealth of biographical, literary, and sociopolitical material. Her critical work is pioneering. In a 2015 interview with Dima al-Shukr, Jayyusi remarked on the established tendency of Arab critics and literary historians to center their analyses on “the social aspect of poetry and the influence daily and political life has on it,”2 rather than on the development of literary technique. To some extent, her divergence from this dominant trend might be a reflection of her involvement with Sh’ir, a Beirut-based magazine with an emphasis on a poetic modernity deliberately uninflected by discourses of political commitment. Nevertheless, Jayyusi moved fluidly between positions and groups, and this intellectual flexibility—combined with her technical specialism—is part of what gives her work such longevity and force. After teaching literature in Sudan and Algeria in the 1970s, Jayyusi served in several visiting positions in the United States. It was during this period that she became aware of the dearth of translated Arabic literature in the West and felt compelled to remedy this. In 1980, she thus undertook the first ever massive translation project of Arabic literature, the Project of