纪伯伦·哈利勒·纪伯伦

纪伯伦·哈利勒·纪伯伦（阿拉伯语：جبران خليل جبران，1883年1月6日—1931年4月10日），黎巴嫩的诗人、作家与画家，被称为“艺术天才”、“黎巴嫩文坛骄子”，代表作：《泪与笑》、《沙与沫》、《先知》、《先知的花园》，是阿拉伯现代小说、艺术、散文的奠基人。

纪伯伦出生于黎巴嫩（当时属奥斯曼帝国统治）的一个马龙礼天主教家庭。幼年未受正规学校教育。后随家庭移居美国。在美国上学时显露出艺术天赋。"Kahlil"的产生就是因为在美国学校的记录错误。1908年赴巴黎师从罗丹学习艺术。后兴趣转向文学，初期用阿拉伯语，后用英语进行写作。纪伯伦的许多作品都带有基督教色彩。1931年逝世于美国纽约，遗体葬于黎巴嫩。

生平

纪伯伦在1883年1月出生于黎巴嫩北部的小山村卜舍里，当时的黎巴嫩属于奥斯曼土耳其帝国的叙利亚行省，是马龙礼天主教基督徒的聚集地区。

评价

作家冰心将纪伯伦和泰戈尔放在一起评价说：“泰戈尔是贵族出身，家境优越，自幼受过良好教育。他的作品感情充沛，语调明快，用辞华美。格调也更天真，更欢畅，更富神秘色彩。而纪伯伦是贫苦出身，他的作品更像一个饱经沧桑的老人在讲为人处世的哲理，于平静中流露出淡淡的悲凉。”

Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān (Arabic: جُبْرَان خَلِيل جُبْرَان; January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran, was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist. He was also considered a philosopher, although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.

Born in Bsharri, a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite Christian family, young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston, where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F. Holland Day. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse in Beirut. Returning to Boston upon his youngest sister's death in 1902, he lost his older half-brother and his mother the following year, seemingly relying afterwards on his remaining sister's income from her work at a dressmaker's shop for some time.

In 1904, Gibran's drawings were displayed for the first time at Day's studio in Boston, and his first book in Arabic was published in 1905 in New York City. With the financial help of a newly met benefactress, Mary Haskell, Gibran studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910. While there, he came in contact with Syrian political thinkers promoting rebellion in Ottoman Syria after the Young Turk Revolution; some of Gibran's writings, voicing the same ideas as well as anti-clericalism, would eventually be banned by the Ottoman authorities. In 1911, Gibran settled in New York, where his first book in English, The Madman, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1918, with writing of The Prophet or The Earth Gods also underway. His visual artwork was shown at Montross Gallery in 1914, and at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1917. He had also been corresponding remarkably with May Ziadeh since 1912. In 1920, Gibran re-founded the Pen League with fellow Mahjari poets. By the time of his death at the age of 48 from cirrhosis and incipient tuberculosis in one lung, he had achieved literary fame on "both sides of the Atlantic Ocean", and The Prophet had already been translated into German and French. His body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri (in present-day Lebanon), to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books, and where a museum dedicated to his works now stands.

In the words of Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, Gibran's life was "often caught between Nietzschean rebellion, Blakean pantheism and Sufi mysticism". Gibran discussed different themes in his writings and explored diverse literary forms. Salma Khadra Jayyusi has called him "the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of [the twentieth] century", and he is still celebrated as a literary hero in Lebanon. At the same time, "most of Gibran's paintings expressed his personal vision, incorporating spiritual and mythological symbolism", with art critic Alice Raphael recognizing in the painter a classicist, whose work owed "more to the findings of Da Vinci than it [did] to any modern insurgent". His "prodigious body of work" has been described as "an artistic legacy to people of all nations".