Adonis: Selected Poems (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Adonis, Khaled Mattawa (Translated by)

$20.00

Publication Date: April 24th, 2012

Publisher:

Yale University Press

ISBN:

9780300181258

Pages:

432

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Description

The first major career-spanning collection of the poems of Adonis, widely acknowledged as the most important poet working in Arabic today

“Poetry for [Adonis] is not merely a genre or an art form but a way of thinking, something almost like mystical revelation.”—Charles McGrath, New York Times

Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets of the Arabic-speaking world. His poems have earned international acclaim, and his influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot’s on English-language verse. This volume serves as the first comprehensive survey of Adonis’s work, allowing English readers to admire the arc of a remarkable literary career through the labors of the poet’s own handpicked translator, Khaled Mattawa.

Daring in form and prophetic in tone, Adonis’s poetry sings of both the sweet promise of eros and the problems of the self. He writes of childhood (“Your childhood is a village. / You will never cross its boundaries / no matter how far you go”); of blood, bombs, and mutilation (“Murder has changed the city’s shape”); and of the anguish of exile (“‘I write poetry in the language of the country that sheltered me,’ said a young man who looked old”). Adonis demonstrates the poet’s affection for Arabic and European lyrical traditions even as his poems work to destabilize those sensibilities.

This collection positions the work of Adonis within the pantheon of the great poets of exile, including César Vallejo, Joseph Brodsky, and Paul Celan, providing for English readers the most complete vision yet of the work of the man whom the cultural critic Edward Said called “today’s most daring and provocative Arab poet.”

About the Author

Adonis (born Ali Ahmad Said Esber) is an award-winning Syrian poet and essayist who led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. He has written more than twenty books in his native Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics. He lives in Paris. Khaled Mattawa is assistant professor of language and literature at the University of Michigan and the author of the poetry volumes Ismaila Eclipse and Zodiac of Echoes.

Praise for Adonis: Selected Poems (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

“Poetry for [Adonis] is not merely a genre or an art form but a way of thinking, something almost like mystical revelation.”—Charles McGrath, New York Times

“Poems of remarkable intellectual and emotional power.”—Lawrence Joseph, Commonweal

“This new selection and translation . . . is certainly needed. . . . [Adonis’s] ‘Concerto for 11th September/2001 B.C.’ . . . is nothing short of brilliant.”—Kel Munger, Sacramento News & Review

“Adonis is one of the great luminaries in contemporary world poetry, and with this impressive and entrancing volume of selected poems in English, superbly translated by Khaled Mattawa, his pool of admirers here in America is bound to increase.”—Spencer Dew, Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Until [now], no single work in English gave an idea of the poet’s range. Adonis: Selected Poems is thus a landmark: the collection matters not just because of its internal beauty, but because it provides a window on the career of one of Arabic literature’s transformational poets.”—M. Lynx Qualey, Kenyon Review

“Provocative, emotionally wrought, and deeply human.”—Keith Rice, Signature

Selected as a finalist for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize sponsored by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry

Adonis was the winner of the 2011 Goethe Prize, given by the city of Frankfurt

Khaled Mattawa was the winner of the 2011 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Adonis: Selected Poems, given by PEN American Center

Khaled Mattawa was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effecive institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defent human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. (prestige/important)

“Adonis, born Ali Ahmad Said Esber in the Alaouite village of Qassabin in western Syria in 1930, is recognized as one of the most important poets and theorists of literature in the Arab world, and one of the most important contemporary poets and poetic thinkers in any language or context. His influence on Arabic poetry can be compared with that of Pound or Eliot on poetry in English, combined, however, with a radical and secular critique of his society. His poetry is widely known and available in Europe, in many languages and multiple translations. Khaled Mattawa, one of the best and most audacious younger American poets, also a brilliant, knowledgeable translator, has worked for two decades, latterly with the collaboration of Adonis, on a collection that will represent his scope, his thought, his linguistic daring and innovation to Anglophone readers. This magisterial anthology, covering more than fifty years of work, marked with the poet’s ‘epic scope and lyrical precision,’ will indelibly mark his presence alongside world poets like Milosz, Akhmatova, Darwish, Neruda, Amichai and Bonnefoy.”—Marilyn Hacker

“There is no doubt this selection will prove to be the standard by which all translations, readings, and studies of Adonis’s poetry in English will be judged. The sweeping canopy of his life’s achievement is astonishing in Khaled Mattawa’s vision. Mattawa’s lyrical rendition of Adonis’s intensely musical Arabic is unparalleled by any available translation, old or recent, of Adonis’s work in English.”—Fady Joudah, translator of If I Were Another: Poems by Mahmoud Darwish