The Sieve

Mikhail Naimy

"The Sieve," in its current edition, is ninety years old. However, unlike what years usually do, these years have only made it younger. Since its first publication in 1923, it remains to this day one of the most widely spread and popular among Naimy's thirty-three works. The probable explanation for this is that this book, in literary criticism and critical theory, was not merely a book when it was published, but also an event. This is because it was the decisive turning point in Arabic Renaissance literature since the beginning of the 19th century, between two intersecting approaches or eras: the overwhelming approach of the neoclassicists, who approached their present and their nation's literary present, poetry or prose, by returning to the past, resulting in their pure imitation producing literature of form without content, or a body without a soul; and another approach, that of the modernists, whom Naimy undertook in his "Sieve" to revive, so that they would be the vanguard of generations that not only break free from the captivity of their past but also work to make their present an eternal past for a new present. This book was, and still is, a constitution for literary modernity, and especially for poetics. It can be said that there is no prominent Arab publisher or poet who does not have something of "The Sieve" in some corner of their cultural make-up.