Modernism in Translation

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book explores the Arab modernist movement, the most significant literary grouping in the Arab world since World War II. It produced a body of work remarkable for its aesthetic ambition and rhetorical coherence. Like many artistic groups of the early and mid-twentieth century, the Arab modernists, gathered around a magazine that acted as the nerve center of their movement: Shi'r [Poetry], a quarterly dedicated to poetry and poetry criticism, founded in 1957 by Yusuf al-Khal. The Shi'r poets' conceptualization of “modernity” or “modernism”—the Arabic word, al-hadatha, can be used for both English terms—was immensely influential.