Hafez Ibrahim

Hafez Ibrahim was born on a houseboat moored on the Nile at Dairut, and the river never left his name: Ahmed Shawqi himself crowned him Sha'ir al-Nil — Poet of the Nile — though Egyptians also called him the People's Poet, and that title tells more. Orphaned young and poor for most of his life, he passed through law offices and an army commission in the Sudan campaign before finding his true post in 1911 as head of the literary section of the Egyptian National Library, where he remained until weeks before his death. Where Shawqi sang from the palace, Hafez sang from the street: his verse mourned disasters, championed the poor and the education of women, scolded the occupier, and gave the nationalist movement its memorized anthems — all in a neoclassical Arabic of ringing clarity he could improvise by the hour. He translated Hugo's Les Misérables and died in June 1932, months before his friend and rival Shawqi. Nineteen years later, Umm Kulthum and Riad al-Sunbati raised his "Misr Tatahaddath An Nafsiha" — Egypt speaking of herself in her own voice — into the unofficial anthem of a revolution he never saw.