Tawfiq Sayigh

Tawfiq Sayigh (توفيق عبد الله صايغ; 1923–1971) was a Palestinian academic, writer and journalist. He was the editor of the controversial Hiwar (حوار) magazine.

Early life and education
Sayigh was born in Kharaba, Syria, on 14 December 1923. He was the second eldest of Abdullah Sayigh and Afifa Batruni's six sons, including Fayez Sayigh, Anis Sayigh and Yusif Sayigh. He also had a sister, Mary. His father was a Protestant pastor of Syrian origin, and his mother was a native of al-Bassa in Palestine. When a Druze revolt occurred in 1925, the family had to leave Kharaba and settled first in al-Bassa and then in Tiberias. Sayigh's family left Tiberas in 1948 after the Deir Yassin massacre.

Sayigh studied at the Arab College in Jerusalem and had a degree in English literature from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1945. He contributed to the AUB's Al Kuliya magazine as a literary editor. He also obtained a MA in Arabic literature from the AUB. During his studies in Beirut he joined Antoun Saadeh's Syrian Social Nationalist Party. His elder brother Yusif and younger brother Fayez were also members of the party.

Sayigh was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1951 and studied comparative literature at Harvard University, having a degree in 1953. Then he studied English literature for one year at Oxford University.

Career
Following his graduation from the AUB Sayigh returned to Palestine where he was employed as a teacher at Rawdat Al Ma’aref College in Jerusalem for one year between 1945 and 1946. Next he joined his alma mater, AUB, and taught Arabic literature from 1946 to 1947. Then he worked as a librarian of the America Cultural Center in Beirut until 1950. During the same period he edited a women's magazine entitled Sawt Al Mar’a (Woman’s Voice). He was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge between 1954 and 1959 and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, between 1959 and 1962.

Sayigh resigned from his teaching post and returned to Beirut. There he edited a bimonthly literary magazine Hiwar in November 1962. The magazine folded in June 1967 after its financial support by the Congress for Cultural Freedom was made public by The New York Times on 25 April 1966. Sayigh first denied this news which he admitted in May 1967.

Sayigh left Beirut and settled in the USA in Fall 1967. There he worked as a visiting professor at different universities, including Princeton University, University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University from 1967 to 1968. He became a lecturer in Near Eastern languages and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968 and worked there until his death in 1971.

Work
Sayigh was part of the free verse poet group and was a modernist poet. His poetry reflected both the struggle of the exiled Palestinians and the Christian identity. His poems were influenced from William Butler Yeats and Friedrich Nietzsche and have been described as one of the most significant experimental work which included cross cultural richness. In Sayigh's poems there were many instances of the symbols from Christianity.

Sayigh's first book was a hand-written monograph entitled The Bible as Literature which contained his essays in the period 1944–1945. The Harvard Advocate published one of his poems, “The Sermon on the Mount”, in April 1951. His articles on modern English poetry were featured in Al Adab in 1955. He also published a poem in Shi'r in 1961. Sayigh wrote various books on Arabic literature and poetry: Talathun Qasida (1954; Thirty Poems), Al-Qasida K (1960; The Poem K) and Mu’allaqat Tawfiq Sayigh (1963; The Ode of Tawfiq Sayigh). The latter was his final published work in poetry. Talathun Qasida was the earliest example of the avant-garde collection of poems in Arabic. He translated some English poems into Arabic one of which was T. S. Eliot’s the Four Quartets.

Death
Sayigh died of heart attack in Berkeley, California, on 3 January 1971 at the age of 47. He was buried at Sunset View Cemetery in El Cerrito, California, on 8 January.