The notion of fasaha (eloquence, clearness, intelligibility) is instrumental in Arab language thinking, and reproving faults of speech (e.g. lahn al-qawl) in modernist poetic practices dominates debates in Arabic literary criticism. In a sense, Arabic was greatly built on a filtering process to distill and preserve its eloquence and its linguistic purity and correctness through fixing errors (akhta', lahn, khalal), fixing obscurity ('istighlagh, ghumud, lahn al-qawl), and fixing misconceptions ('isa'at al-maqsad). For example, lahn al-qawl (Q. 47:30), or “the allusive manner of speech” as Tarif Khalidi sharply renders it in The Qur'an: A New Translation (New York: Penguin Group, 2008), contributes to the perennial question of the untranslatability of the language of poetry. In this paper, I shall limit my analysis to the Syrian-Kurdish poet Salim Barakat (b. 1951) who is one of the major exponents of new aesthetics in form and language in Arabic poetics. Barakat’s poetic oeuvre has not received sufficient critical and scholarly attention because he adopts a stubborn style that exhausts language and that is rigorously resistant to translation. His modernist approach to language is both foreign and abstract yet stems from a rich classical repertoire, namely the long-standing legacy of gharib (linguistic obscurities) literature, and by extension the wahshiyy and hushyy (wild), nadir (rare), and mustaghligh (obscure) in the Arabic tradition. Fittingly, the critic Jaroslav Stetkevych tells us that “modern poetry creates itself, as it were, “in the wild” of language, not otherwise” (Stetkevych 2012, 155). I precisely argue that Barakat’s poetic project is linguistic and boils down to a single issue, namely the issue of 'ujma (obscurity, unintelligibility; antonym of fasaha). To this purpose, I will discuss the defining terms that govern Barakat’s poetic practice, and hence his theory of language, through exploring his concept of the opaque poem which reflects a deliberate and audacious use of ambivalent words and syntactic disruption. I will make use of an essay by Barakat titled “tasamim al-kayd al-lughawi: al-qa'ida fa l-khud'a” (Arabic Dislodged: Cunning and Linguistic Tricks) which argues that the linguistic conundrum is seminal to the Arabic literary discourse.