Translation by Bassam Khalil Frangieh

August 4, 1999 - Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, an Iraqi poet who was a major innovator in his art form, died on Tuesday in Damascus, Syria. He was 73 and had lived in Damascus since leaving Amman, Jordan, earlier this year.
The cause was a heart attack, reported The Associated Press, which said that he was hospitalized after an asthma attack.
"Al-Bayati led Arabic poetry beyond the constraints of classical Arabic poetical forms, transcending the traditional rhyme schemes and conventional metric patterns that had prevailed for more than 15 centuries," said Bassam K. Frangieh, a professor of Arabic language and literature at Yale University, in a preface to his poetry, which differed from classical Arabic poetry in content as well as form and reflected a wide range of interests.
Translations of poems by Bayati -- as well as the Arabic originals -- "Love, Death & Exile: Poems Translated From Arabic" (1991, Georgetown University Press) brought praise for Bayati and for Frangieh, the translator.
The Rev. Solomon I. Sara, professor of Linguistics at Georgetown, said the book "recreates the passion and the revolutionary fervor of the poet." The title reflects perennial elements in Bayati's poetry.
He spent much of his life outside his homeland and was living in Amman when he said in a 1992 interview that he thought many Arab artists had lost touch with their own societies, crippled by censorship and repression and seduced by desire for a comfortable way of life. But at that time he refused to write polemics on social or political problems. Instead he focused on spiritual malaise. "From beneath the ruins," he wrote in one poem, "the people view the destroyers."
His birthplace was the sprawling Iraqi capital, Baghdad, which he wrote about in his poem "Elegy to the Unborn City." He earned a degree in 1950 in Arabic language and literature from the Teachers Training College. That year his first collection of poetry, "Angels and Devils," was published, in Arabic.
He became a teacher, but his leftist views soon cost him his job. He criticized the Iraqi monarchy as contributing editor for a new Iraqi magazine, New Culture. The magazine was shut down, and he was imprisoned for a time.
A second collection of poems, "Broken Pitchers," was published in 1954 to applause. But it was truly revolutionary, and he had to take flight in 1955. He lived in Syria and then in the Soviet Union and Egypt. In 1958, Iraq was proclaimed a republic after an army coup d'etat. King Faisal and the crown prince were killed.
Bayati returned to Iraq, but disagreements with the government ensued and he fled again. A decade later, after another coup, he returned, but went into self-exile again after the government started a harsh campaign against the left.
In 1980, shortly after Saddam Hussein became Iraq's president, he tried to placate Bayati by appointing him to an Iraqi diplomatic post in Madrid. But Bayati was appalled by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and resigned.
In 1995, the Iraqi government canceled his citizenship after he traveled to the conservative Saudi Arabia to take part in a cultural festival.
Bayati is survived by his wife, Hind Al-Bayati, of Bakersfield, Calif.; two sons, Ali and Saad, who live in Iraq; a daughter, Asma, of Syria, and 13 grandchildren.
In 1997, he said that his many years of absence from his homeland had been a "tormenting experience" that had great impact on his poetry. He added, "I always dream at night that I am in Iraq and hear its heart beating and smell its fragrance carried by the wind, especially after midnight when it's quiet."

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