Monday, October 29, 2007

Kahlil Gibran's Collected Works - A Complaint

Alan Jacobs does a wonderful parody over at First Things of Gibran's style, which sums up the Levantine lyricist's arrant nonsense better than any mere criticism could manage. A sample:
Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran,
And weary grows the mind doomed to read it.
The hours of my penance lengthen,
The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine,
And those hours may be numbered as the sands of the desert.
And for each of them Kahlil Gibran has prepared
Another ornamental phrase,
Another faux-Biblical cadence,
Another affirmation proverbial in its intent
But alas! lacking the moral substance,
The peasant shrewdness, of the true proverb.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the state of the ripe only the ripe understand...alan is unripe