Marilyn Hacker translated a poet born in this country in books like Here There Once Was a Country. An invasion of this country prompted the suicide of the author of “The Threshing Floors of Hunger,” disrupted the Afro-Asian Writers’ journal Lotus, and is the backdrop of a long prose poem whose speaker frequently yearns for the “aroma of coffee.” An author born in this country wrote a novel in which the original copy of the Rubaiyat is lost in the sinking of the Titanic and Omar Khayyam escapes execution in (*) Samarkand. In a book by an author born in this country, a man instructs “Love one another, but make not a bond of love: / Let it rather be a moving sea” in response to Almitra the Seeress’s questions as he prepares to board a ship to leave Orphalese. For 10 points, name this birth country of Amin Maalouf and an author who wrote about Almustafa in The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran. ■END■
ANSWER: Lebanon [or Republic of Lebanon; or Lebanese Republic; or Liban; or Lubnān; or Al-Jumhūrīyah Al-Lubnānīyah] (The first poet is Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Khalil Hawi committed suicide following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut, which is depicted in Memory for Forgetfulness by Mahmoud Darwish.)
<JK, World Literature>
= Average correct buzz position