The Pine Trees That Would Not Leave Me
While visiting the Lebanese mountain town Dhour El Choueir, I couldn't shake off a painting and a poem I had translated two decades earlier.
Six years ago, on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion at the Port of Beirut killed more than two hundred people, wounded thousands, and devastated large parts of the capital.
This August, sitting with a friend at a family-run restaurant amid the pine trees of Dhour El Choueir, a mountain town overlooking Beirut, I found myself unable to shake off a painting and a poem I had translated two decades earlier.
Lebanese painter Moustafa Farroukh’s watercolor “A Group of Pines in Bekfaya” was painted just a few miles from here in 1936. Born and first trained in Beirut under the painter Habib Serour, Farroukh later studied in Rome and Paris before returning to establish his practice in his native city. Through portraits and idealized landscapes, he offered a vivid vision of Lebanon’s people and terrain. Farroukh became a foundational figure in modern Lebanese painting, his art helping shape a visual language for the country while its political and cultural identity was still taking form under the French Mandate.
The painting of the pine grove was seared into my memory when I first saw it in 2003 in a catalog accompanying a Sursock Museum exhibition of Farroukh’s works. (The watercolor was on loan from the private collection of Emile Nasrallah.) Sursock itself later became a victim of the Beirut Port explosion. The blast shattered its stained-glass windows and damaged the historic building as well as dozens of artworks. The museum reopened on May 26, 2023, with five exhibitions, one of them titled Beyond Ruptures.
In August 1937, the Armenian poet Vahan Tekeyan was also here in Dhour El Choueir when he wrote the sonnet “To a Lebanese Pine Tree.”
I reconnected with the sonnet after returning home. I corrected a few errors in my translation, adjusted the wording and rhythms, and tried to bring the English closer to the movement of Tekeyan’s Armenian.
Here is the translation as I read it now, at twice the age I was when I first attempted it, with many more years of witnessing Lebanon from near and far.
