Adonis, an Arab poet in the run-up to the Nobel prize

Apr 11, 2024 | Uncategorized

Coinciding with the visit to our headquarters of the Syrian-Lebanese poet and essayist Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Qasabin, Syria, 1930), known by the pseudonym Adonis, Tres Culturas wanted to pay him a small tribute by presenting the author's works, which can be found in the Foundation's Fatima Mernissi Library.

Although he was born in Syria, the poet left his country in 1956 to settle in Lebanon, where he obtained his nationality and finally moved to Paris in 1985, where he lives today. Considered the greatest exponent of contemporary Arabic poetry and even the greatest writer in the Arabic language, Adonis has received numerous awards, accolades and prizes throughout his life, including the 1974 National Poetry Prize (Beirut); Officier des Arts et des Lettres (France, 1983); Picasso Medal 1984 (UNESCO); Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Geneva (2004), Goethe Prize 2011 (Frankfurt am Main) or the Gold Medal of the Circle of Fine Arts (2022). For more than twenty years he has repeatedly been considered a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

As the author himself explains in an interview, he felt he was born for poetry from an early age, and especially after an anecdote that changed the course of his life, turning it "into a kind of myth". Born in a small village in Syria, where there was no water or electricity, little Ali learned to recite the ancient poets from his father, a great fan of classical Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic period to late Islam. Spontaneously, without quite knowing how, the young boy began to write poetry. In 1943, when he was 13 years old, he heard that the president of the First Syrian Republic, Shukri al-Quwatli, who had embarked on a journey through all the provinces to get to know the country better, would visit a village near his village. The young man composes a poem to welcome the president, celebrate his visit and applaud the country's independence. In a dream, he manages to recite his composition to the president who, impressed by it, asks him how he can help him, to which the young man replies that he wishes to go to school. To his surprise, this dreamlike "prophecy" is fulfilled in reality and he manages to attend the last French lycée in Syria, the best school in the country at the time.

The poet relates the adoption of his nickname to this mythical aspect of his life because "how can someone have a dream that comes true? When he was only fifteen years old, he began sending his poems to newspapers and magazines in his country, without ever receiving a reply. One night, when he was feeling particularly angry at the repeated rejections, he read the myth of Adonis and, impressed, decided to adopt that name as his pseudonym. With the new alias he finally managed to see his creations published. After graduating in Literature from the University of Damascus in 1954, and after completing his military service two years later, Adonis decided to leave his country for good for political reasons - he was imprisoned for six months for his activities as a member of the Syrian Socialist Party - and settled in Lebanon, beginning a new stage in a life which, according to him, was to be characterised by a series of continuous beginnings. During his stay in Lebanon, he founded and collaborated with several publications, including the legendary magazine Shiir (Poetry), dedicated to promoting new lyrical talent in Arab countries.

The poet was then aware of the path he had to follow. Just as he had created a new history for himself, he had to create a new stage for poetry. If he could contribute nothing original, there would be no point in writing. And to create this new lyrical epoch he had to provoke a rupture, both with the inherited poetic language and with the cultural framework of that language, since the world and artistic production can only advance through a series of fractures with what had gone before. The first foundation of that cultural framework he encounters is religion. "So I broke with religious culture, and then I continued to break with the predominant language of Arabic poetry. For the poet, his break with religion was inevitable, as poetry cannot be separated from thought, "there has not been a single poet since the time of Homer who has not been a thinker at the same time". For Adonis, the arrival of Islam marginalised poetry to the realm of feelings, by reserving thought to the religious sphere, preventing it from dealing with all subjects, as had been the case in pre-Islamic times. This is why "none of the great poets ever adhered to Islam (...) All the great Arab poets were necessarily anti-religious".

In order to achieve this new lyrical mode, Adonis revisits the Arabic legacy, tearing it out of its academic framework, rereading it and bringing it into the modern world. He did the same with Arabic poetry and prose, extracting from them what could connect with the modern reader. "For me, writing poetry was like rewriting Arab history and culture". In the opinion of critics, Adonis revolutionised poetic language, which is why he is considered the pioneer of modern Arabic poetry. In the author's own words, 'I did not only break with poetry, I created a new era for Arab culture, for Arab poetry, Arab prose and Arab literature (...). Today everyone knows that it was the basis for a whole new understanding of Arab culture.

The reader interested in discovering or rereading Adonis' poetic work has at his disposal some of his most famous collections of poems in the Library of Three Cultures. The first, in chronological order according to the year of publication in Arabic, is the unabridged version of '...'.Songs of Mihyar of Damascus'. (Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 1997). As its translator, Pedro Martínez Montávez, explains in the prologue to this bilingual edition, the renowned Arabist had already published a partial translation of this work in 1968, seven years after its Arabic edition, this being "the first poetic book by the author to appear in the Western European language". It is considered a turning point in Arabic poetry, Songs of MihyarAdonis' third book of poems was the poet's initial and definitive break with both his previous works and with existing Arabic poetry, and is therefore an interesting read when it comes to understanding the evolution of his work.

The volume entitled 'Book of escapes and moves through the climes of day and night'. (Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 2005), is also the first complete translation into a Western language of this work, based on the definitive version published by the poet in 1988 - although the first Arabic edition had appeared in 1965. In the words of Federico Arbós, translator and prologue of this bilingual edition, this is a book "profoundly Heraclitian, an endless poetic journey, an endless flight through the desert and the inner jungles of perception and consciousness (...) And also the journey of the body in the body itself, through its veins and tendons, through the infinite orbits of the gaze, the human body as the place where all the elements of the world mingle and transform".

If during the 1960s Adonis had sought a language of his own, albeit rooted in the Greco-Latin, Mediterranean and Arabic heritage both pre-Islamic and post-revelation of the Prophet Muhammad, critics agree in pointing to a new turning point in the early 1970s, strongly influenced by the events following the "Naksa", the setback, the disaster of the June 1967 war that ended with the Israeli occupation of most of the Palestinian territories, in addition to some positions in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Mixing verse and prose and with hardly any punctuation, the new poems are full of references to the historical moment in which they were composed.

Two of the productions of this period are considered to be the most original works of 20th-century Arabic poetry. On the one hand, the three poems collected in 'This is my name'. (Alianza Editorial, 2006), dated between 1969 and 1971 and first published under the title '....A time between the rose and the ash'.later republished in its definitive version revised by the poet under the current title, to which his second poem gives its name. This collection of poems in a bilingual edition is completed by "Prologue to the History of the Kings of Taifas" and "Epitaph for New York", the critics agreeing that the latter is the best poem written by Adonis. In the second most significant work of this period 'Singular'. (Linteo Editions, 2005), published in Arabic in 1977, Adonis continues the linguistic and aesthetic experimentation transferred to the terrain of carnal, spiritual and mystical love, producing an "anarchic and revolutionary torrent reminiscent of Sufi literature and poetry".

Again thanks to the formidable work of Ediciones de Oriente y del Mediterráneo, one of Adonis' most ambitious works, '...', was published in Spanish in 2005 - 10 years after its appearance in Arabic.The book (I)', This is the first translation into another language. The first of a collection of three volumes - written between 1995 and 2003 and totalling almost 2,000 pages - the copy of this beautiful edition in the Tres Culturas Library was also signed by the author himself, who visited the Foundation in January 2008, when he met the poet Chantal Maillard. 'The Book (I) is a literary fiction in the form of poetry, in which Adonis adopts the device of pretending to be a commentator on a manuscript found by chance and attributed to Al-Mutanabbi (10th century), almost unanimously regarded as the greatest Arab poet of all time. Over the course of the three volumes, Adonis traces the history and politics of Arab societies, creating a lyrical mural in which to depict the complexity of nearly fifteen centuries of Arab civilisation. After the titanic effort of the three volumes of The BookAdonis has published several collections of poetry, including '.History tearing itself apart in a woman's body'. (Huerga y Fierro Editores, 2012), in which there is a four-voice dialogue between "the narrator", "the woman with her child", "the chorus" and "the man", although the woman's voice prevails among them all. Sensual and enveloping, this collection of poems deals with themes such as the place of women in sacred texts, pleasure and ablation, and is surprising for its feminine perspective, which is similar to that of other writers who knew how to put themselves in the place of women, such as Tolstoy and Flaubert.

Throughout his prolific life, Ali Ahmad Said Esber, Adonis, has produced 20 books of poems and 13 volumes of studies and critical essays, as well as having translated into Arabic authors such as Ovid - his was the first complete translation of the Metamorphosis-He has also written in French two of the great Arab poets, Abu Ala Al-Maarri and Khalil Gibran. His erudition, his originality and his enormous contribution in the poetic field have placed him for years on the threshold of the Nobel Prize for Literature. A prize that would validate the possibility of transcending the barriers of Arab culture and placing it at the centre of world literature.

Adonis, an Arab poet in the run-up to the Nobel prize

Feb 13, 2024 | Articles

Coinciding with the visit to our headquarters of the Syrian-Lebanese poet and essayist Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Qasabin, Syria, 1930), known by the pseudonym Adonis, Tres Culturas wanted to pay him a small tribute by presenting the author's works, which can be found in the Foundation's Fatima Mernissi Library.

Although he was born in Syria, the poet left his country in 1956 to settle in Lebanon, where he obtained his nationality and finally moved to Paris in 1985, where he lives today. Considered the greatest exponent of contemporary Arabic poetry and even the greatest writer in the Arabic language, Adonis has received numerous awards, accolades and prizes throughout his life, including the 1974 National Poetry Prize (Beirut); Officier des Arts et des Lettres (France, 1983); Picasso Medal 1984 (UNESCO); Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Geneva (2004), Goethe Prize 2011 (Frankfurt am Main) or the Gold Medal of the Circle of Fine Arts (2022). For more than twenty years he has repeatedly been considered a strong candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

As the author himself explains in an interview, he felt he was born for poetry from an early age, and especially after an anecdote that changed the course of his life, turning it "into a kind of myth". Born in a small village in Syria, where there was no water or electricity, little Ali learned to recite the ancient poets from his father, a great fan of classical Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic period to late Islam. Spontaneously, without quite knowing how, the young boy began to write poetry. In 1943, when he was 13 years old, he heard that the president of the First Syrian Republic, Shukri al-Quwatli, who had embarked on a journey through all the provinces to get to know the country better, would visit a village near his village. The young man composes a poem to welcome the president, celebrate his visit and applaud the country's independence. In a dream, he manages to recite his composition to the president who, impressed by it, asks him how he can help him, to which the young man replies that he wishes to go to school. To his surprise, this dreamlike "prophecy" is fulfilled in reality and he manages to attend the last French lycée in Syria, the best school in the country at the time.

The poet relates the adoption of his nickname to this mythical aspect of his life because "how can someone have a dream that comes true? When he was only fifteen years old, he began sending his poems to newspapers and magazines in his country, without ever receiving a reply. One night, when he was feeling particularly angry at the repeated rejections, he read the myth of Adonis and, impressed, decided to adopt that name as his pseudonym. With the new alias he finally managed to see his creations published. After graduating in Literature from the University of Damascus in 1954, and after completing his military service two years later, Adonis decided to leave his country for good for political reasons - he was imprisoned for six months for his activities as a member of the Syrian Socialist Party - and settled in Lebanon, beginning a new stage in a life which, according to him, was to be characterised by a series of continuous beginnings. During his stay in Lebanon, he founded and collaborated with several publications, including the legendary magazine Shiir (Poetry), dedicated to promoting new lyrical talent in Arab countries.

The poet was then aware of the path he had to follow. Just as he had created a new history for himself, he had to create a new stage for poetry. If he could contribute nothing original, there would be no point in writing. And to create this new lyrical epoch he had to provoke a rupture, both with the inherited poetic language and with the cultural framework of that language, since the world and artistic production can only advance through a series of fractures with what had gone before. The first foundation of that cultural framework he encounters is religion. "So I broke with religious culture, and then I continued to break with the predominant language of Arabic poetry. For the poet, his break with religion was inevitable, as poetry cannot be separated from thought, "there has not been a single poet since the time of Homer who has not been a thinker at the same time". For Adonis, the arrival of Islam marginalised poetry to the realm of feelings, by reserving thought to the religious sphere, preventing it from dealing with all subjects, as had been the case in pre-Islamic times. This is why "none of the great poets ever adhered to Islam (...) All the great Arab poets were necessarily anti-religious".

In order to achieve this new lyrical mode, Adonis revisits the Arabic legacy, tearing it out of its academic framework, rereading it and bringing it into the modern world. He did the same with Arabic poetry and prose, extracting from them what could connect with the modern reader. "For me, writing poetry was like rewriting Arab history and culture". In the opinion of critics, Adonis revolutionised poetic language, which is why he is considered the pioneer of modern Arabic poetry. In the author's own words, 'I did not only break with poetry, I created a new era for Arab culture, for Arab poetry, Arab prose and Arab literature (...). Today everyone knows that it was the basis for a whole new understanding of Arab culture.

The reader interested in discovering or rereading Adonis' poetic work has at his disposal some of his most famous collections of poems in the Library of Three Cultures. The first, in chronological order according to the year of publication in Arabic, is the unabridged version of '...'.Songs of Mihyar of Damascus'. (Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 1997). As its translator, Pedro Martínez Montávez, explains in the prologue to this bilingual edition, the renowned Arabist had already published a partial translation of this work in 1968, seven years after its Arabic edition, this being "the first poetic book by the author to appear in the Western European language". It is considered a turning point in Arabic poetry, Songs of MihyarAdonis' third book of poems was the poet's initial and definitive break with both his previous works and with existing Arabic poetry, and is therefore an interesting read when it comes to understanding the evolution of his work.

The volume entitled 'Book of escapes and moves through the climes of day and night'. (Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 2005), is also the first complete translation into a Western language of this work, based on the definitive version published by the poet in 1988 - although the first Arabic edition had appeared in 1965. In the words of Federico Arbós, translator and prologue of this bilingual edition, this is a book "profoundly Heraclitian, an endless poetic journey, an endless flight through the desert and the inner jungles of perception and consciousness (...) And also the journey of the body in the body itself, through its veins and tendons, through the infinite orbits of the gaze, the human body as the place where all the elements of the world mingle and transform".

If during the 1960s Adonis had sought a language of his own, albeit rooted in the Greco-Latin, Mediterranean and Arabic heritage both pre-Islamic and post-revelation of the Prophet Muhammad, critics agree in pointing to a new turning point in the early 1970s, strongly influenced by the events following the "Naksa", the setback, the disaster of the June 1967 war that ended with the Israeli occupation of most of the Palestinian territories, in addition to some positions in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Mixing verse and prose and with hardly any punctuation, the new poems are full of references to the historical moment in which they were composed.

Two of the productions of this period are considered to be the most original works of 20th-century Arabic poetry. On the one hand, the three poems collected in 'This is my name'. (Alianza Editorial, 2006), dated between 1969 and 1971 and first published under the title '....A time between the rose and the ash'.later republished in its definitive version revised by the poet under the current title, to which his second poem gives its name. This collection of poems in a bilingual edition is completed by "Prologue to the History of the Kings of Taifas" and "Epitaph for New York", the critics agreeing that the latter is the best poem written by Adonis. In the second most significant work of this period 'Singular'. (Linteo Editions, 2005), published in Arabic in 1977, Adonis continues the linguistic and aesthetic experimentation transferred to the terrain of carnal, spiritual and mystical love, producing an "anarchic and revolutionary torrent reminiscent of Sufi literature and poetry".

Again thanks to the formidable work of Ediciones de Oriente y del Mediterráneo, one of Adonis' most ambitious works, '...', was published in Spanish in 2005 - 10 years after its appearance in Arabic.The book (I)', This is the first translation into another language. The first of a collection of three volumes - written between 1995 and 2003 and totalling almost 2,000 pages - the copy of this beautiful edition in the Tres Culturas Library was also signed by the author himself, who visited the Foundation in January 2008, when he met the poet Chantal Maillard. 'The Book (I) is a literary fiction in the form of poetry, in which Adonis adopts the device of pretending to be a commentator on a manuscript found by chance and attributed to Al-Mutanabbi (10th century), almost unanimously regarded as the greatest Arab poet of all time. Over the course of the three volumes, Adonis traces the history and politics of Arab societies, creating a lyrical mural in which to depict the complexity of nearly fifteen centuries of Arab civilisation. After the titanic effort of the three volumes of The BookAdonis has published several collections of poetry, including '.History tearing itself apart in a woman's body'. (Huerga y Fierro Editores, 2012), in which there is a four-voice dialogue between "the narrator", "the woman with her child", "the chorus" and "the man", although the woman's voice prevails among them all. Sensual and enveloping, this collection of poems deals with themes such as the place of women in sacred texts, pleasure and ablation, and is surprising for its feminine perspective, which is similar to that of other writers who knew how to put themselves in the place of women, such as Tolstoy and Flaubert.

Throughout his prolific life, Ali Ahmad Said Esber, Adonis, has produced 20 books of poems and 13 volumes of studies and critical essays, as well as having translated into Arabic authors such as Ovid - his was the first complete translation of the Metamorphosis-He has also written in French two of the great Arab poets, Abu Ala Al-Maarri and Khalil Gibran. His erudition, his originality and his enormous contribution in the poetic field have placed him for years on the threshold of the Nobel Prize for Literature. A prize that would validate the possibility of transcending the barriers of Arab culture and placing it at the centre of world literature.