Birth: NULL/NULL/1923 Death:NULL/NULL/1971
Born in Khirbet Houran, Syria, in 1923 to a Christian family (Syrian father and Palestinian mother); moved with his family (the father was a priest) to Al-Buseh village (near Tiberias) in 1924, then to Tiberias in 1930; studied at the Arab College in Jerusalem; received a BA in English Literature from the AUB in 1945; was the literary editor of the AUB’s Al-Kuliya magazine; returned to Palestine and worked as a teacher at Rawdat Al-Ma’aref College in Jerusalem from 1945-46; worked as a Professor of Arabic Literature at the AUB from 1946-47, while also continuing his MA studies in Arabic Literature; then worked briefly as translator in Palestine, then returned to Beirut and became librarian of the American Cultural Center in Beirut from 1948-50; at the same time, was editor-in-chief of the Sawt Al-Mar’a (Woman’s Voice) magazine; won a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1951 and studied Comparative Literature at Harvard University, graduating in 1953; spent a year at Oxford University, UK, specializing in English Literature; then worked as a lecturer at Cambridge University from 1954-59, then at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, from 1959-62; resigned and returned to Beirut, where he founded a bimonthly review entitled Al-Hiwar (Dialogue) in 1962, publishing it until 1967; went to the US as Guest Professor lecturing at Princeton, Chicago and John Hopkins University from 1967-68; then was appointed as lecturer in Near Eastern Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, US, from 1968-71; wrote a number of books on Arabic literature, incl. Talathun Qasida (Thirty Poems, 1954), Al-Qasida K (The Poem K, 1960), and Mu’allaqat Tawfiq Sayigh (The Ode of Tawfiq Sayigh, 1963); and translated American literary works into Arabic, incl. T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, the Four Quartets (Ruba’iyyat Arba’, Beirut, 1970); died in the US in 1971.
