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, while seated with a friend at a family-run restaurant among the pine trees of Dhour El Choueir, a mountain town overlooking Beirut, I could not get a painting and a poem I had translated two decades earlier out of my mind. Lebanese painter Moustafa Farroukh’s watercolor “A Group of Pines in Bekfaya” was made only 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 build his practice in his native city.
Through portraits and idealized landscapes, Farroukh presented a vivid image of Lebanon’s people and terrain. He became a foundational figure in modern Lebanese painting, helping shape a visual language for the country while its political and cultural identity was still taking form under the French Mandate. The pine grove painting stayed fixed in my memory when I first saw it in 2003 in a catalog for a Sursock Museum exhibition of Farroukh’s works; the watercolor had been on loan from the private collection of Emile Nasrallah. Sursock itself later fell victim to the Beirut Port explosion, which shattered its stained-glass windows and damaged the historic building and dozens of artworks. The museum reopened on May 26, 2023, with five exhibitions, including one titled Beyond Ruptures.
In August 1937, the Armenian poet Vahan Tekeyan was also in Dhour El Choueir when he wrote the sonnet “To a Lebanese Pine Tree.” After returning home, I revisited the poem, corrected a few errors in my translation, adjusted its wording and rhythms, and tried to bring the English closer to the movement of Tekeyan’s Armenian. Here is the version I read now, at twice the age I was when I first attempted it, after many more years of witnessing Lebanon from near and far.
Born in Constantinople in 1878, Tekeyan came of age in an Armenian literary world that would be shattered during his lifetime. Poet, editor, teacher, and public figure, he belonged to a generation whose intellectual and literary lives cannot be separated from the violence that dispersed Ottoman Armenians across new geographies. By 1937, Lebanon had become one of the key centers of Armenian revival in the Middle East, as survivors of the Armenian Genocide rebuilt community life around churches and secular institutions. Tekeyan took part directly in that revival, becoming the first editor of the new Armenian newspaper in Beirut, Zartonk (“Awakening,” still published today), and placing “To a Lebanese Pine Tree” in its inaugural issue in September 1937.
For all the Armenian resonances of Tekeyan’s wounded tree, the poem is unmistakably Lebanese. Reading it in Lebanon in August 2026, I was struck less by what the pine might symbolize than by how closely its contradictions seemed to mirror the country around me. In writing and in conversation, “resilience” is often used freely when discussing Lebanon, but repeated praise of resilience can make the suffering behind it feel normal. Western media also frequently casts Lebanon as hedonistic, focusing on nightlife and crowded beach clubs where the party goes on amid economic collapse and political crisis. That framing, like the celebration of resilience, romanticizes precarity while obscuring the scars of war and the uneven costs of crisis.
Tekeyan’s pine suggests something more layered, and Farroukh’s pines help illuminate the poem. Farroukh’s trees stand together. What is often reduced to hedonism may instead be read as one expression of solidarity: an insistence on gathering with friends and family against the odds, even while bearing the marks of violence. My grandparents were child survivors of the Armenian Genocide who found refuge in Lebanon, where my parents and I were born. I grew up during the Lebanese Civil War and came of age in its aftermath. When I first translated Tekeyan’s poem in 2003 and encountered Farroukh’s painting in the exhibition catalog that same year, I was still living there. Three years later came another war, and soon after, I moved to the United States. But it was only in Dhour El Choueir, in August 2026, that the poem and the painting finally came together for me, revealing something about Lebanon beyond the familiar scripts. The wounds remain. The tree sways.
Acknowledgment: The author would like to thank Rowina Bou Harb, Head of Archives at the Sursock Museum, for her assistance.
