Hunger that can be fed by poetry

• Last Updated: August 13. 2008 9:11PM UAE / August 13. 2008 5:11PM GMT

‘Poetry,” wrote Robert Frost, “is what’s lost in translation.” Arabic melody and metre have a resonance intimately their own, which is perhaps why Arabic poetry is so celebrated within the Arab world but often misunderstood elsewhere. But whether you are an Arabic speaker or not, it’s difficult to miss the significance of the TV programme Prince of Poets. Last year 30 million viewers tuned in as bards from across the Arab world battled for the title and a Dh1 million prize. This year’s Prince or Princess will be selected tonight after two months of American Idol-style eliminations.

The programme received 7,000 applications this year, all of whom had to “show their commitment to the old tradition”, according to Dr Ali bin Tamim, a judge on the show. Submissions of narrative poetry and those that did not conform to classical guidelines were rejected.

The programme has enormous appeal for a younger demographic and the contestants themselves must be between the ages of 18 and 45. “It bridges a cultural divide between the generations,” says Dr Tamin. The attraction to distinctly Arabic traditions also affirms how young Arabs hunger to celebrate their own heritage, even as they are bombarded with Western influences.

In the West, poets were formerly “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, as Percy Shelly claimed in the 19th century. But literature, and poetry in particular, often becomes a parody of itself in the “post-modern” West, mocking its own roots. In the Arab world, too, literary culture has suffered since the libraries at Cordoba, Cairo and Tripoli were the intellectual lights of the world. But perhaps we needn’t look further than the success of Prince of Poets to see a renaissance under way in the Middle East

The life and work of Mahmoud Darwish, arguably the greatest Arabic poet of a generation who was buried yesterday, shows how, when all other tools have been taken away from a man, poetry remains. In his poem My Mother, he implored: “I must be worthy of my life / At the hour of my death / Worthy of the tears of my mother.” As we try to build a future that is worthy of our past, we must hold ourselves to the same challenge. The Prince of Poets is a noble beginning.