Anon shrewdly said: “Language is fossil poetry”, and since poetry is music to each ear, regardless of language, it is unanimous and universal.  In other words, be Roman to the Romans and Greek to the Greeks. 

Languages are the relics of Babel ’s demise and curse, and the confusion they had created.  They are mystifying medium of communication and our real earthly inheritance. Through their multitude and diversity, they offer shrines, where the richness of knowledge and notion dwells; altars, where the collision of culture and civilization is sacrificed; and the eloquent romancing and rendering of the words, where poems, tales and studies are weaved.

All languages have their beauty and grace, appropriately manifested in the form of poetry rather than in prose. Every language has its system, syntax and grammar with distinguished sounds and compositions.  The Latin term “Versus & Prosus” (poetry & prose) sums up the picture of creating out of a handful of limited alphabets and phonics a lexicon of words.

All languages’ prose is, to an extent, translatable, but poetry cannot be possibly translated verbatim. It can only be recreated and remade through transliteration, because it embodies, beside verse, rhyme, stanza, etc, allured and hidden emotions arousing words and local terms as well as picture arousing thrills appropriate only to that language and culture. The complete Rhyming Dictionary (The Laurel Ref. Shelf) stated that: “ … The emotion-arousing quality in words cannot be stated otherwise even in the same language, much less in another one. There is no translation in English for emotion-arousing words such as home, mother, love, and so on; not house or domicile, not mamma or maternal ancestor or Moms or ma, not affection, or devotion or lust or rut.  How can night be expressed in another word, moon or sun, or May, or December? Each of these words -to some extent each word in the language- has a tone color, a history, a personality, and effectiveness of its own”. 

Have you ever wonder why you cannot understand someone, whose native tongue and culture are different, but who speaks, grammatically and linguistically, perfect English? The answer, I believe, is found in the way each culture self-express and convey their thoughts, as brilliantly illustrated by this graph created by Robert B. Kaplan in his “Cultural Thought Patterns in Inter-Cultural Education” (Language Learning, 16, nos. 1 & 2:15)

I offer you the opportunity to savor the colorful poetry in four languages. The Arabic, English and French poems are my very own writing.  They are not translations or transliterations of each other.  Russian is just my humble contribution in perfecting the English version of the Russian poems of many deceased and contemporary Russian poets.  For more details, read the introduction to the Russian part of this site.

Knowing more than one language is, in itself, a blessing in disguise, as one demonstrates an ability to diversify, and acquires a taste for that language’s rich culture. It is never too late to learn another language, and experience the beauty.

If you are one of the lucky polyglots, this site will allow you to cross the Atlantic and fly over the English Channel with a glass of scotch, resting high on the Eiffel Tower with a carafe of wine, cruising the Mediterranean to the eternal Cedars of Lebanon and the Marvels of the Holy Land with a goblet of Arak, or dining at a literary bistro in St. Petersburg with a bottle of Vodka and a guitar.