Among the 17 best poetry books of the Fall 2010, Hunffington post lists a collection of Selected poems by Adonis translated in English for Yale University Press.

Adonis (Adunis)  is the contemporay Syrian poet that „grew international fame in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the Arab world’s leading poets, as well as one of its best-known intellectuals and critics. Finally, there is the Adonis of the 1990s and of the new century, grand old man of Arabic letters, university professor, author of some of the most controversial writings on Arabic culture of the last half century.”

(foto Time Out Dubai)

„what links these decades together, as well as the poetic and critical work they produced, is Adonis’s permanent commitment to an open future, which should take the legacy of the past forwards and outwards, resisting the temptation to be content with inherited attitudes. ”

According to Adonis, „Arab poetic modernity consists of a radical questioning that explores the poetic language and that opens up new experimental areas for writing. Writing here continually puts Arab civilisation in question, while at the same time putting itself in question.”

from Al Ahram Weekly

Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter
No, I have no country
except for these clouds rising as mist from lakes of poetry.
Shelter me, Dhawd, guard me, Dhawd! --
my language, my home--
I hang you like a charm around the throat of this era
and explode my passions in your name
not because you are a temple
not because you are my father or mother
but because I dream of laughter, and I weep through you
so that I translate my insides
and cling to you as I tremble as my sides shudder like windows
shaken by a wind let loose from God's fingers.

from HP

And also a poem Adonis read in Arab followed by an English translation of his poem at Prague Writers Festival in 2009 Continuă lectura Adonis, poezia araba de azi (engleza) →