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Adonis (b. 1930) - pseudonym of 'Ali Ahmad Sa'id |
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Syrian-Lebanese poet, literary critic, translator, and editor, a highly influential figure in Arabic poetry and literature today. Adonis's poetry combines a deep knowledge classical Arabic poetry and revolutionary, modernist expression. Like a number of Middle Eastern writers, Adonis has explored the pain of exile – "I write in a language that exiles me," he once said. When he first started writing poems, he used to sign them Ali Ahmed Said; the local papers never printed them. About the age of fifteen, he changed his name to Adonis. "The mystery of poetry is that it remains a form of speech which goes against normal speech, so that it can give new names to things, seeing them in a new light. Language here does not only create the object; it creates itself in creating the object. Poetry is where the word transcends itself, escaping from the boundaries of its letters, and where the object takes on a new image and a different meaning." (An Introduction to Arab Poetics by Adonis, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, London: Saqi Books, p. 73; originally published as Introduction à la poétique arabe, 1985) Adonis
was born 'Ali Ahmad Sa'id in the village of Qassabin, near the city
of
Latakia, in western Syria. His father was a farmer and imam; he died in
1952.
"Our house was too small for the family," Adonis recalled, "so we built
a wooden bed where we could sleep. Its wooden legs were high enough fot
the cow to live under it." ('Adonis or Adunis (pseudonym of Ali Ahmad Esber or Saïd,' in World Authors 1975-1980, edited by Vineta Colby, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1985, p. 10) The village teacher taught Adonis to read and write, but he did not
attend school, or saw a car or listen to a radio until he turned
twelve. From his father, an influential figure in his life, he received
a traditional Islamic education. As a child, he had the opportunity to
recite from memory a poem before the Syrian president Shukri
al-Quwwatly. When the president offered to reward him, Adonis requested
education as his prize. In 1944, Adonis entered the French
Lycée at Tartus, graduating in 1950. He was a good student, and he managed to secure a government scholarship to university. Dalila (1950), Adonis's first collection of verse, was
published by Ibn Zaydoun press in Damascus. Adonis studied law and
philosophy at the Syrian University in Damascus, graduating in 1954. He
served then two years
in the army, but due to his political views – he was a member of the
Syrian National Socialist Party – Adonis spent part of his
service in jail. The leader of SSNP, Antoun Saadeh, was executed by the
Lebanese State in July 1949. After leaving his native country in 1956,
Adonis
settled with his wife, the literary critic Khalida Sa'id, in Lebanon,
becoming a Lebanese citizen. Adonis first became interested in the theoretical aspects of writing poetry in the 1950s. (The root of the Arabic word for poetry (shi'r) is the verb sha'ara, which means "to know", "to understand" and "to perceive".) He read the actual text of Arabic poetry and came to the conclusion that the prevailing interpretations operated entirely inside the established religious framework. With his friend, Yusuf Al-Khal (1917-1987), he founded the poetry magazine Shi'r, which introduced modernistic ideas into Arabic poetry. The name was borrowed from the American magazine Poetry. Its first issue was banned in several Arab countries. "We yearn for a new Lord, a different deity," wrote Adonis in 'The New Noah,' published in the Spring 1958 issue. (City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut by Robyn Creswell, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 12) When rumors started to spread, that Shi'r was infiltrated by Syrian nationalist elements, it was temporarily suspended. The group around the magazine dissolved. Adonis broke his ties with al-Khal, who started the review with another editorial board. Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi (1961, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene) was Adonis's first major collection of poems, in which references to the past become a vehicle for awakening. The central figure, Mihyar, is a Zarathustra-like prophet, an archetypal hero. His existence is defined by rootlessness, or as Adonis writes in the opening poem, 'Psalm': "He is wind. The wind does not retrace its steps. He is water. Water never flows back to its source. He creates his own kind. Starting with himself. He has no ancestors. His roots are in his footsteps." (Mihyar of Damascus, His Songs, translated from the Arabic by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2008, p. 23) It has been said, that the importance of the book in Arabic is comparable to Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) in English or Rilke's Duino Elegies in German. Adonis adopted his pseudonym early in his career,
crystallizing in
the name the idea of spiritual renewal. Adonis, a Hellenized form of
the Canaanite-Phoenician Tammuz, is in Greek mythology a
handsome young man, Aphrodite's lover; his story also includes the
theme of resurrection. In 'Resurrection and Ashes' (1957) Adonis wrote: "O
Phoenix, when fire is born in your beloved wing / What pen do you hold?
/ How do you replace your lost down? / Do you erase the dry error in
its book? When ashes embrace you, what world do you feel?" (Modern Arab Poets, 1950-1975, translated and edited by Issa J. Boulatta, Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1976, p. 67) In 1964 Adonis edited an important anthology of
Arabic poetry, Diwan ash-shiar al-arabi. With a vanguard of Arab
writers, he started in 1968 to publish Mawakif (Situations), a
journal which
championed like Shi'r the renovation of Arabic literary
conventions, but in a more radical way. The first
collection of Adonis' verse in English, The Blood of Adonis,
appeared in 1971. The edition was reissued with three new poems under
the title Transformations of the Lover (1982). A Muslim intellectual and a world writer, Adonis has build bridges between Western influences and Arabic, Greek and biblical tradition. Moreoever, while in Paris, he translated French poetry and drama, especially the works of Saint-John Perse and Georges Scheade. "The west is another name for the east," he once wrote. Western materialism, which he rejects, is his target in 'A Grave for New York'. The poem was based on his visit in the city in 1972. Adonis addresses Walt Whitman, who becomes his guide as Virgil was Dante's guide through Hell: "I see letters to you flying in the air above the streets of Manhattan. Each letter is a carriage full of cats and dogs. The age of cats and dogs is the twenty-first century, and human beings will suffer extermination: This is the American Age!" (Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 148) Decades later, in 1998 Adonis confessed, that he finds himself "closer to Nietzsche and Heidegger, to Rimbaud and Baudelaire, to Goethe and Rilke, than to many Arab writers, poets and intellectuals." Adonis was appointed professor of Arabic literature at the Lebanese University in 1970. Three years later Adonis earned a doctoral degree from the St Joseph University in Beirut. The subject of his thesis was "The Fixed and the Dynamic in Arab Culture". In 1975 the civil war in Lebanon broke out and in the 1980s the war escalated – the Israeli army moved on to Beirut, and the Syrians become entrenched. During this period, Adonis stayed mostly in Beirut. In 1980-81 he was a visiting lecturer at the university Censier Paris III. Moreover, Adonis taught at the Collège de France, Georgetown and Princeton universities in the United States, and the University of Geneva. After leaving the Lebanese University, Adonis moved in 1986 to Paris and eventually took French citizenship. In 2001, Adonis was awarded the Goethe Medal of the Goethe-Gesellschaft and in 2011 he won Germany's Goethe Prize for his cosmopolitan work and contribution to international literature. Adonis's name has often been mentioned among the Nobel Prize candidates. Although Adonis has critically examined problems of the Middle
East, as
a poet he has been more interested in experimentation, language, and
freeing poetry from the traditional formalism, than to comment
contemporary socio-political issues. According to Adonis, the Arab poet
has two sides, the I and the Other, the Western persona. In 'A Desire
Moving Through the Maps of the Material' (1986-87) he wrote: "thus I no
longer hesitate to say: / "the I and the other / are me," and time is
but a basket / to collect poetry". (in Poems for the Millennium: The University
of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry: Volume Two: From
Postwar to Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre
Joris, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 192) Exile is not only the basic
definition of the being of the Arab poet; the language itself is born
in exile. The poet lives between two exiles, the internal one and the
external one. And there are "many other forms of exile as well:
censorship, interdiction, expulsion, imprisonment and murder." Being
an independent thinker, Adonis's
views of the stagnation of the Arab culture and literature have aroused
much controversy. He has maintained that religion is the cause of
problems
and called a separation between religion and the state. ISIS represents
the end of Islam. Continuing his conversation with Houria Abdelouahed,
which started in Violence et Islam (2015), he said: "Islam is like Judaism, and the shar'
(Muslim law) is a bit too much like Jewish law for comfort. There are
differences in details, but the core remains the same. Yet Judaism
evolved compared to Islam for it became part of Western civilization." (Prophecy and Power: Violence and Islam II, with translated by Julie Rose,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021) Adonis' poems, which often
have a deep mystical sense of
history, has been characterized as abstract. To his critics Adonis has
answered: "nothing clarifies me like this obscurity / (or perhaps it
was: nothing obscures me like this clarity)". (from 'A Desire Moving through the Maps of the Material', in Poems for the Millennium: The University
of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry: Volume Two, p. 194) After the bombardment of
Kana during the war in Lebanon in 2006,
Adonis said in a interview that "Israel only sees the Arab world with
eyes of glowing, angry metal, the metal of tanks, bullets or bombers."
Like President Bashar al-Assad, Adonis belongs to Syria's minority
Alawite sect. He
wrote an open letter in the year of the Arab Spring, 2011, to al-Assad,
in which he condemned the brutality of the Syrian regime, saying that
there can never be enough
prison space for an entire nation. In disussing the efforts to destroy
the ISIS he has asked, "How can forty countries ally against ISIS for
two years and not be able to do a thing?" (The New York Review of Books, April
16, 2016) Adonis don't write poems in a study behind a desk: "I write in
any small café in any small street. The café could be in Paris or
Beirut," he said in an interview in 2022. ('I Have Been Born Three Times: An Interview With Adonis, Part Two' by Huda Fakhreddine, Michigan Quarterly Review Online, 2022/06) In 2024, Adonis received the Joan Margarit International Poetry Prize. For further reading: Le nouveau bruit du temps: essai sur Adonis by Aymen Hacen; lettre-préface de Serge Pey (2023); The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (2021); 'Introduction' by Robyn Creswell, in Songs of Mihyar the Damascene by Adonis (2019); Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry by Khaled Furani (2012); 'Adonis, the Syrian Crisis, and the Question of Pluralism in the Levant' by Franck Salameh, in Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, Volume 3, Issue 1 (2012); Conversations With My Father, Adonis by Ninar Esber (2008); Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi (1987); 'Adonis or Adunis (pseudonym of Ali Ahmad Esber or Saïd,' in World Authors 1975-1980, edited by Vineta Colby (1985); Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry by M.A. Badawi (1975) Selected works:
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