The Poetics of Narrative in Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati’s “Symphony of the Gypsy”

Narratives are widely employed in poetry in order to improve the formal structure and to convey deep layers of semantic connotations through defamiliarization in the reader’s mind. This scheme is one of the most prominent components in the integration and structure of Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati’s poetry, the well-known contemporary Arab poet. Engaging narrative techniques and the creative use of storytelling has bestowed an ingenious composition and an ambiguous complexity to the narration and verbal construction of his work “Symphony of the Gypsy,” and this makes the poem potentially more interpretable and more decipherable. The narration of the poem is composed of two parts, of which the latter shines light on the questions and ambiguities aroused in the former. This study is aimed at reviewing the elements of narration in “Symphony of the Gypsy” in order to analyze the aesthetics of storytelling and the poet’s use of artistic devices in the poem. The results show that although the elements of narrative in “Symphony of the Gypsy” are not completely in line with the poetics of narration, the narrative of this poem has been constructed artistically. In “Symphony of the Gypsy,” Bayati has sought to depict the familiar wandering of a gypsy as a symbolic representation of pains of the mankind throughout the history. He does so by means of aesthetics of narrative poetry such as the plot, characters, visualizations, dialogues, perspective and the theme, through entangling the abstract and the concrete, through intertwining the past and the present. Summoning legends and archetypes, with the symbolic characters in his poem assisting him (including the gypsy, the virgin and the foreteller), Al-Bayati further mystifies and universalizes his narration, generalizing the gypsy’s sorrow to the collective grief.