The Syrian poet and essayist Muhammad al-Maghut is hardly a model citizen. Since the 1950s, when his poems began to appear, he has cultivated a raffish and impudent stance. In his unrhymed, metrically free verses he mocks himself (and by implication his contemporaries) with mischievous gusto. Despising slogans, he creates a deliberately unsavory self-image:

Poetry, this immortal carcass, bores me.
Lebanon is burning – it leaps, like a wounded horse, at the edge of the desert
And I am looking for a fat girl
To rub myself against on the tram

In traditional Arabic poetry, composed since the sixth century according to strict rules of meter and rhyme (and still being written that way at the time of Mr. al-Maghut’s birth in 1934), the poet presents himself in idealized guise: an ungovernable spirit, bold and resolute, a master of swords as well as words. And the classical poet was expected to brag, the more outlandishly the better. The great 10th-century poet al-Mutanabbi, the “Shakespeare of the Arabs” (whose clangorous verses cast bitter reverberations over the modern poet’s outbursts), once wrote: “If I’m arrogant, it’s the arrogance of a wonder of nature / who’s never found anyone superior to himself!” Moreover, even when indulging in the most extravagant obscenity, the classical poet never lost his poise.

But Mr. al-Maghut will have none of this. Long resident in Beirut and having experienced the worst horrors of the Lebanese civil war, he has nothing left but a savage disgust, not only with the powers-that-be but with his heritage, his homeland, and even his language.

If my country won’t see me
Or declines to put up an argument in public,
Let it talk to me from behind a wall
Or leave the songs in an old bag on a doorstep
Or behind some tree,
And I’ll run and nose them out like a dog
As long as the word “freedom” is shaped, in my language,
Like a small chair for execution.

The Arabic word for “freedom” is hurriya and it’s true, in the original script it does look like a portable torture-rack. But the larger point is that in Arabic “freedom” has too often been little more than a rancid buzzword, incessantly mouthed by politicians and demagogues until its very meaning has been blurred. For Mr. al-Maghut, the notion of freedom both torments and enlivens his verse; if it flickers anywhere, it is in the most disreputable corners and alleyways of his city, among whores and beggars, and not in “the stoning squares of Mecca” or “the dance halls of Granada”:

Ignore guides and maps.
Into the mud or fire with all you’ve written
By way of footnotes and impressions.
Any old peasant
Rolling his cigarette before his tent
Will tell you in two quatrains of a folk song
The history of the East.

What lifts his poetry above mere bitter complaint is Mr. al-Maghut’s caustic compassion for the dispossessed, the discarded, the outcast, all those untouched by the “glories of the Arab past” or the shrill slogans of the present:

I am preparing a huge portfolio
On human suffering
To present to God
As soon as it is signed by the lips of the hungry
And the eyelids of the waiting.
But oh, you miserable ones everywhere,
I have a fear That God may be illiterate.

These excerpts come from a selection of Mr. al-Maghut’s poetry entitled “Joy Is Not My Profession”(Signal Editions, 63 pages, $12.), beautifully translated by John Asfour and Alison Burch. The Lebanese-born Mr. Asfour is himself a poet, and it shows in the scrupulous tact with which he and Ms. Burch capture the wildly veering tones of the original, a furious collision of the slangy and the grandiose.

In a world corrupted by bad faith, rotten promises, and a language gutted by official lies, even the simplest pleasures turn sour:

I want my body to vibrate like a wire
In some distant cemetery,
Or tumble into a well
Stocked with beasts, mothers, and bracelets.
I’ve forgotten the shape of spoons and taste of salt,
Moonlight and the smell of children.
My stomach bulges with cold coffee and bad water,
My throat’s jammed with paper scraps and slabs of snow.
How I crave the water that we once knew.

The force of that last line comes from the near-mystical aura that surrounds water throughout the Islamic world. In the Koran, rainwater is one of the most tangible of God’s blessings; in paradise the blessed will sip from the cooling fountains of Salsabil. Early poets entreated clouds to shower their beloveds, and the Prophet Muhammad himself is often invoked as a “raincloud of blessing.”

Most contemporary Arab poets deal with predictable themes. Love songs and political tirades predominate. But Mr. al-Maghut, with a very few others, stands apart. He is irreducibly personal. Like his countryman ‘Ali Ahmad Sa’id, who writes under the penname “Adunis,” Mr. al-Maghut is unmistakably himself. But while Adunis has always been a lyrical mythmaker, from his early “Songs of Mihyar the Damascene” to his current massive opus audaciously called “The Book” (an appellation traditionally reserved for the Koran itself), Mr. al-Maghut chews myths up and spits them out.

After many years in Beirut, Mr. al-Maghut has returned to Damascus, where he now lives, reportedly in failing health. Younger poets accord him respect, but he’s not likely to be paraded as a national ornament by the Syrian authorities. In his poem “The Surplus Man,” he writes.

My voice dies off like the thunder’s,
Having no future generation to sing to
Nor any old mouth to return to.

And he ends the poem with the wish, “If one could change countries / like dancers in nightclubs!” Yet in his own truculent fashion, Mr. al-Maghut is a patriot, not of any regime or government, but of the stubbornly local, the momentary, a partisan of the pebble, a patriot of the disregarded.