Lebanon (Through Writers' Eyes) - Softcover

T.J. Gorton; A Feghali Gorton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906011273 ISBN 13: 9781906011277

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd, 2009

Synopsis

This book is a record of the people who visited Lebanon from between 1800 BC to the last summer; and of the Lebanese themselves, writing about their homeland, their religions, their joys, their wars and their sorrows. The passages have been selected and presented by Ted Gorton and Andree Feghali Gorton. Ted first came to Lebanon in 1967, to study Arabic at the American University of Beirut, AUB; there he met his archaeologist wife Andree., They describe their book as a labour of love: in it, the visitor to Lebanon will discover a country that is infinitely richer, more diverse and perennial than the headlines of the last few decades might suggest. A Lebanese reader will delight in the familiar, as well as discovering new treasures of description, analysis, and literature.

About this title

About the Author

Ted Gorton came early to Oriental studies, spending formative years in Turkey where his father was the US military attche, and studying at the American University or Beirut in the 1960's. He later took a doctorate in Arabic Studies from Oxford and lectured at St.Andrews University, from where he was lured wawy to Arabia, spending 25 years in the oil business before returning to his first love, Arabic poetry. He has published extensively on Hispano-Arabic poetry in scholarly journals as well as preparing two collections, Andalucia and Arabia, for Eland's Poetry of Place series.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This Mountain of Lebanon --
Like the hedgehog, Lebanon knows one Big Thing, and that big thing is of course the mountain, Mount Lebanon or just Lebanon as Antiquity knew it. The west-facing littoral known in the West as the Levant or the Orient--both meaning `rising sun'--passes, on its way down to Egypt, through modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. The narrow, fertile coastal plain rises more or less abruptly into hills or mountains a few kilometres inland. The highest by far of those seaward-facing mountain ranges is in the middle: Lebanon, rising to over 3,000 metres. On the highest peaks, there are pockets of eternal snow, but the copious snows that do melt feed springs and streams and rivers that water the coastal plain and give it an extraordinary fertility, a legendary beauty. On the other side, facing east, the slopes are more abrupt and arid, leading down to the fertile upland valley of the Bekaa, itself hemmed in on the east by another mountain chain called the Anti-Lebanon or Hermel. Beyond, far below, lies Syria, and the ancient tracks of the frankincense or silk roads leading across the desert to Petra, Palmyra, Damascus, Aleppo, and beyond, towards Iraq, Arabia and Persia.

In Central Europe or the Andean countries, such a mountain would be, if not commonplace, at least less of a marvel. But in the Middle East, snowy mountains and trackless forests were--are--more than a novelty. They struck the ancients as marvellous in every sense. For many centuries, most human activity was confined to the arable coastal plain, with its string of natural ports. The forest and wildlife of the mountain was exploited as a boundless natural reserve. From the earliest recorded times, however, we find hermits and anchorites and solitary madmen, rebels and fugitives and fanatics of all kinds, taking refuge in the lofty wilderness, living in the caves overlooking the holy rivers: Kadisha (`holy' in every Semitic language); and the Adonis River, the name redolent of beauty, thwarted love, meddlesome gods, tragic death and mystical rebirth. It is as though the former nomads of the desert and steppe, lifting up their eyes unto the hills, found it natural that gods or God would live up there, and the mystical among them would climb up to be closer to the divine.

The texts in this book span three millennia and then some. If Lebanon cannot manage stability, it has perennity. Empires rise, dynasties fall, ideas and faiths come in from the sea or desert, then clash and wither in a high-speed newsreel that defies synopsis. So, other than in passing--as we present the texts in each section of this book--we will let the writers speak for themselves and for their historical moment. And those writers are themselves an unruly lot. Natives tend to the mystical, while expatriates describe the place they visited to see if the rumours were true (like Herodotus), or the country they had to go through to get to the Holy Land (like many of the 18th- and 19th-century travellers). The more literary of our travelling writers dwell on natural beauty, while journalists and politicians record the perversity of men who persist in destroying the thing they profess to love.

About this edition

• Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1906011273
• ISBN 13: 9781906011277
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250