Al-Bada’i’ wa al-tara’if (Best Things and Masterpieces), a collection of thirty-five of Gibran’s pieces, was published in Cairo in 1923. The works had been selected by the publisher, and the collection is uneven and miscellaneous. It includes several short articles on major Arab thinkers, illustrated with portraits drawn from Gibran’s imagination, and prose poems and sketches of the sort familiar from his earlier collections. Two pieces are of more interest than the others. “Safinat al-dubab” (A Ship in the Mist) is a strange romantic short story. A lonely young man dreams of a woman who visits him continually in his sleep and is his wife in spirit. When he is sent to Venice, he finds her; but she has just died. Iram, dhat al-’imad (Iram, City of Lofty Pillars) is a one-act play set in a city mentioned in the Qur’an. A young scholar, Najib Rahma, comes to the mysterious city seeking a prophetess, Amina al-’Alawiya, who is said to have visited there. He first meets her disciple, the dervish Zayn al-’Abidin; then Amina al-’Alawiya appears and expounds a monistic mystical philosophy.
Alice Raphael, The Art of Kahlil Gibran, The Seven Arts, March, 1917, pp. 531-534
Jurji Zaydan, Al-Hilal, January 1915, pp. 309-310.
Kalimat Jubran, edited by Antonius Bashir, Beirut: al-Maktabat al-Thaqafia, n.d. [1st edition: al-Qahirah: Yusuf Bustani, 1927].
O Mother Mine, I Wandered Among the Mountains, Three Maiden Lovers [Three Lebanese Folk Poems Translated from the Arabic], Folk Songs of Many Peoples, Vol. II, New York: The Woman's Press, 1922, pp. 370-373; 380-381; 386-387.
On Giving and Taking, The Syrian World, 4, 7, March 1930, p. 32 [digitized by the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA].
Spirits Rebellious, Translated from the Arabic by Anthony R. Ferris, Edited by Martin Wolf, New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.
Gibran’s first book in English, 'The Madman: His Parables and Poems,' was completed in 1917; it was brought out in 1918 by the young literary publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who went on to publish all of Gibran’s English works. An introduction, in which the narrator tells how he became a madman when a thief stole his masks and he ran maskless through the streets, is followed by a series of pieces that were written, and sometimes published, separately. Most were composed in Arabic and translated into English by Gibran with Haskell’s editorial assistance. New here are a sardonic or bitter tone and a move from prose poem to parable as Gibran’s major mode of expression. The pieces include “The Two Cages,” in which a caged sparrow greets a caged lion each morning as “brother,” and “The Three Ants,” in which the insects meet on the nose of a sleeping man. The first two remark on the barren nature of this strange land; the third insists that they are on the nose of the Supreme Ant. The other ants laugh at his strange preaching; at that moment the man awakes, scratches his nose, and crushes the ants. Reviews were mixed but mostly positive. Mayy Ziyada, however, told Gibran that the “cruelty” and “dark caverns” in the work made her nervous. Several of the poems were anthologized in poetry collections.
Yasūʻ ibn ʼal-ʼinsān: ʼaqwāluhu wa-ʼafʻāluhu kamā ʼakhbarahā wa-dawwanahā ʼalladhīna ʻarafūh [Jesus the Son of Man: His Words and His Deeds as Told and Recorded by Those Who Knew Him], translated into Arabic by Anṭūniyūs Bashīr, Miṣr: al-Maṭbaʻah al-ʻAṣrīyah, 1932.
