Khalil Gibran:
A Living Literary Voice
By Bisan Hasan
As a new English translation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Broken Wings (first published in Arabic in 1912) finds its way to readers next year, we invited its translator, Bisan Hasan, to reflect on the enduring relevance of Gibran’s writing in which, more than a century later, its questions about love, freedom, social expectation and personal choice remain strikingly familiar.
In this feature, Hasan explores the language, imagery and cultural tensions that shape the novel, considering how its treatment of love, gender and social expectation continues to speak to contemporary readers. For her, translating the novel has meant negotiating the distance between Gibran’s Arabic and the contemporary English reader while preserving the imagery, musicality and emotional force of his prose.
—PP Editorial
“Soon, O Selma, soon you shall pass from the arms of my father into the arms of another man. Soon the law of God will lead you from this secluded home into the wide arena of the world. This garden shall long for the tread of your feet, and your father shall become a stranger to you. Destiny has spoken, Selma.”
— Khalil Gibran, The Broken Wings
In The Broken Wings, Kahlil Gibran tells the story of a love affair thwarted by the social and religious conventions of early twentieth-century Beirut. The narrator and Selma Karamy fall in love, but their future is shaped by men who wield authority over her life, turning a private relationship into a struggle against the institutions that govern it. Through Selma’s fate, Gibran examines the cost of denying women the freedom to choose whom they love and how they live.
Gibran’s treatment of love, authority and women’s freedom is inseparable from the language through which he expresses it. His prose is highly lyrical, and its images often carry emotional associations that cannot be reproduced word for word. As a translator, I have to consider not only what a phrase means, but how its particular choice of words shapes the reader’s experience of the story. The challenge is to find English that preserves the force of the original while allowing its language to speak to contemporary readers.
I’d like to consider the following passage that posed a challenge when figuring out how to retain the Arabic depth with an English equivalent.
“For every young man, a Selma appears unaware during the springtime of his life, investing his solitude with a poetic meaning, replacing the loneliness of his days with companionship, and the serenity of his nights with melodies.”
Arabic:
«لكل فتى سلمى تظهر على حين غفلة في ربيع حياته، وتجعل لانفراده معنى شعريًا، وتبدّل وحشة أيامه بالأنس، وسكينة لياليه بالأنغام.»
One of the hardest parts of translating this passage was preserving Gibran’s poetic imagery, without making the English sound stiff or distant. Arabic can hold several emotional associations within a compact, lyrical structure. English, though, requires different choices. The phrase rabī hayātihi “ربيع حياته” literally means “the spring of his life.” I chose to retain the image, slightly adjusting the translation to “the springtime of his life” because it carries both the sense of youth and the freshness associated with spring.
Similarly, the phrase “وحشة أيامه” (wahshat ayyāmihi) brings together loneliness and the days through which it is experienced. The possessive construction, “his days”, locates this feeling within the fabric of an individual life, while the abstract noun wahsha gives that experience an emotional weight that extends beyond a passing moment of solitude. I chose “the loneliness of his days” to preserve this relationship between feeling and time. Rather than recasting the phrase as a description of his emotional state, the English retains the days themselves as the frame through which his loneliness is understood. The choice therefore preserves the phrase’s reflective quality while allowing its emotional force to emerge through the relationship between its two elements.
Gibran’s prose is compelling in his use of the phrase “a Selma” (Selma Karamy is the central female character and the narrator’s beloved.) The indefinite article transforms her name from a reference to a particular woman into something more universal. Selma becomes an embodiment of love itself, and of the emotional experience she represents. I chose to retain this small but significant distinction in translation, preserving the possibility that Selma might be understood not only as an individual, but as a figure through whom a familiar human experience takes shape. This approach also reflects my decision to retain the poetic imagery of phrases such as “the springtime of his life”, where figurative language carries meaning beyond its literal sense.
I intended to preserve not only the meaning of the Arabic, but also its emotional quality to allow the reader to experience the feeling Gibran expresses. In this way, the translation allows Gibran’s personal experience to become universal both in emotions and in language.
The novel also raises difficult questions about women and the expectations placed upon them. In one passage, Gibran describes a man whose desire for a son to inherit his name and status leads him to despise his wife:
“The materialistic man looks upon his barren wife with the same eyes with which he beholds a slow suicide; he loathes her, abandons her, and seeks her death, as though she were a treacherous enemy bent upon his ruin.”
This passage exposes the cruelty of a social order in which the continuation of a man’s name and status takes precedence over his relationship with his wife. The comparison between the wife and “a slow suicide” is striking. His disappointment in her inability to bear a son becomes a form of hostility towards her, as though she were responsible for his own destruction. Gibran’s language reveals the extent to which patriarchal expectations can transform a wife from a person into an obstacle to a man’s ambitions. For contemporary readers, the passage invites reflection on how inherited social values continue to shape the ways women are judged and valued.
This tension is also present within the shape and essence of the language itself. Some phrases reflect the gender expectations and social values of Gibran’s time, and may sound troubling or outdated to contemporary readers. The Arabic term “العاقر” (al-ʿāqir), which I have translated as “barren”, directly identifies a woman through her inability to bear children. However, “barren” does more than describe Selma’s inability to have a child, it reveals how the man reduces her worth to her reproductive ability. The word exposes the violence of viewing a woman primarily through her capacity to bear a son, which is still relevant in areas of the world today. My responsibility as a translator was not to make such language more comfortable or to erase its historical harshness. Instead, I wanted to preserve the character’s voice and allow the cruelty of his attitude to remain visible. The English word “barren” likewise carries associations of sterility and unproductiveness, making it a charged choice when applied to a woman.
I chose to retain this force rather than replace the word with a more neutral expression. The translation does not endorse the judgment directed at the woman but seeks to preserve the severity of Gibran’s language so that readers can confront the attitudes it exposes. In this instance, fidelity to the original means retaining not only the literal meaning of the word, but also its emotional and cultural implications. The translation allows the cruelty of the social expectation to remain visible, rather than softening the language that conveys it.
When a text contains attitudes that may no longer be acceptable, I believe the translator should distinguish between preserving the author’s meaning and endorsing the ideas expressed by a character. My role was to remain faithful to the emotional and social implications, while allowing the passage to be read critically.
For this translation, I had to recognise and maintain Gibran’s intentions to lay bare issues back then which still exist in modern-day society. Although women’s roles have changed dramatically in many societies, expectations and prejudices surrounding marriage, motherhood, and childbirth have not disappeared everywhere, making the use of harsher terms important to reflect both the past and present.
For me, translating The Broken Wings is not about making Gibran artificially relatable. It is about allowing his voice to reach a modern reader while remaining faithful to the spirit, imagery, and emotional depth of the Arabic original. It also shows why this piece remains more than a historical literary work. Its world may belong to another period, but its questions about power, gender, love, and social pressure continue to resonate. Perhaps we do not return to Gibran because his world is exactly like ours, but because, more than a century later, his questions can still become our questions.