Adonis أدونيس
Adonis Syrian poet
Born	Ali Ahmad Said Esber (1930-01-01) January 1, 1930 (age 82) Al Qassabin, Latakia,  Syria
Pen name	Adonis
Occupation	Writer
Language	Arabic
Nationality	Syrian
Period	Second half of 20th century[1]
Genres	Essay, Poem
Literary movement	Modernism[1]
Notable award(s)	Bjørnson Prize 2007 Goethe Prize 2011

Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Arabic: علي أحمد سعيد إسبر‎; transliterated: alî ahmadi sa'îdi asbar or Ali Ahmad Sa'id; born 1 January 1930), also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis (Arabic: أدونيس), is a Syrian poet and essayist. He has written more than twenty books in Arabic language.

Imprisoned in Syria in the mid-1950s as a result of his beliefs, Adunis settled abroad and has made his career largely in Lebanon and France. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature,^[2] he has been regularly nominated for the award since 1988^[3] and has been described as the greatest living poet of the Arab world.^[4]

Biography[link]

Early life and education[link]

Ali Ahmad Said Asbar was born in Al Qassabin, Latakia, in Northern Syria, to an Alawite family.^[5] From an early age, he worked in the fields, but his father regularly had him memorise poetry, and he began to compose poems of his own. In 1947, he had the opportunity to recite a poem for Syrian president Shukri al-Kuwatli; that led to a series of scholarships, first to a school in Latakia and then to the Syrian University in Damascus, where he received a degree in Philosophy in 1954.

Name[link]

The name Adonis was not given to Said by Antun Saadeh, the leader of the radical pan-Syrian Syrian Social Nationalist Party, as some believe. Rather, at age 17 he picked it himself after being rejected by a number of magazines under his real name, to "alert napping editors to his precocious talent and his pre-Islamic, pan-Mediterranean muses".^[4] In 1955, Said was imprisoned for six months for being a member of that party.

Beirut / Paris[link]

Following his release from prison in 1956, he settled in Beirut, Lebanon, where in 1957 he and Syro-Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal founded the magazine Majallat Shi'r ("Poetry Magazine") that met with strong criticism as they published experimental poetry.^[6] Majallat Shi’r ceased publication in 1964, and Adunis did not rejoin the Shi’r editors when they resumed publication in 1967. In Lebanon, his intense nationalistic feelings, reflecting pan-Arabism focused on the Arab peoples as a nation, found their outlet in the Beiruti newspaper Lisan al-Hal and eventually in his founding of another literary periodical in 1968 titled Mawaqif, in which he again published experimental poetry.^[7]

Adunis's poems continued to express the poet's nationalistic views combined with his mystical outlook. With his use of Sufi terms (the technical meanings of which were implied rather than explicit), Adonis became a leading exponent of the Neo-Sufi trend in modern Arabic poetry. This trend took hold in the 1970s.

Adunis received a scholarship to study in Paris from 1960-1961. From 1970 to 1985 he was professor of Arabic literature at the Lebanese University. In 1976, he was a visiting professor at the University of Damascus. In 1980, he emigrated to Paris to escape the Lebanese Civil War. In 1980-1981, he was professor of Arabic at the Sorbonne in Paris.

On 27 January 1995, following Syrian pressure, it was announced in Damascus that he had been expelled from the Arab Writers Union.^[8]

In August 2011, Adunis called in an interview in Kuwaiti newspaper Al Rai for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down over his role in the Syrian uprising.^[9]

Work[link]

Adunis is a pioneer of modern Arabic poetry. He is often seen as a rebel, an iconoclast who follows his own rules. "Arabic poetry is not the monolith this dominant critical view suggests, but is pluralistic, sometimes to the point of self-contradiction."^[10] Adunis's work has been analysed and illuminated by the pre-eminent Arab critic Kamal Abu Deeb, with whom he edited the journal Mawakif in Beirut in the 1970s.

After a trip to New York in 1971, Adunis wrote the poem "The Funeral of New York", which opens:

Picture the earth as a pear
or breast.
Between such fruits and death
survives an engineering trick:
New York,
Call it a city on four legs
heading for murder
while the drowned already moan
in the distance.
New York is a woman
holding, according to history,
a rag called liberty with one hand
and strangling the earth with the other.

After the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer instead of Adunis in the year of the Arab Spring, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund said it was not awarded based on politics, describing such a notion as “literature for dummies”.^[11] Adunis has helped to spread Tranströmer's fame in the Arab world, accompanying him on readings.^[12]

Awards and honours[link]

In 2007, he was awarded the Bjørnson Prize. In 2011, he won the Goethe Prize.^[13]

• Bjørnson Prize (2007)
• Goethe Prize (2011)

List of works[link]

Adunis has written over twenty books in the Arabic language. Several of his poetry collections have been translated into English. Khaled Mattawa’s translation of Adonis: Selected Poems has been shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Poetry

• If Only the Sea Could Sleep (trans from Al-A'mal al Shi'riyya, (The Complete Works, 3 volumes) (2000) ISBN 1-931243-29-8
• The Pages of Day and Night (Marlboro Press, 1994) ISBN 0-910395-96-9 (2000 edition): ISBN 0-8101-6081-1
• The blood of Adonis;: Transpositions of selected poems of Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said) (Pitt poetry series) ISBN 0-8229-3213-X
• Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (1960) poems available online include:
  • Not A Star
  • A Voice
  • A King is Miyhar
  • The Adoring Rock
• Take me to God
• Transformations of the Lover. (trans. Samuel Hazo.) International Poetry Series, Volume 7. Ohio University Press: Athens, Ohio, 1982.
• An Introduction to Arab Poetics. (trans. Catherine Cobham.) Saqi Books: London, 1990.

_______Banipal Interview. No. 2, June, 1998. http://www.jehat.com/en default.asp?action=article&ID=43

_______"Language, Culture, Reality." The View From Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature: A Selection from Alif Journal of Contemporary Poetics ed. Ferial J. Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow. The American University in Cairo Press, 1994.

_______Sufism and Surrealism. (trans. Judith Cumberbatch.) Saqi Books: London, 2005.

_______Transformations of the Lover. (trans. Samuel Hazo.) International Poetry Series, Volume 7. Ohio University Press: Athens, Ohio, 1982.

_______Victims of A Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry.(trans. Abdullah Al-Udhari.) Saqi Books: London, 1984. A Time Between Ashes and Roses (trans. Sharkat M. Toorawa)

Literary criticism and essays

• An Introduction to Arab Poetics (2000) ISBN 0-86356-301-5

• “The Poet of Secrets and Roots, The Ḥallājian Adūnis” [Arabic]. Al-Ḍaw’ al-Mashriqī: Adūnis ka-mā Yarāhu Mufakkirūn wa-Shu‘arā’ ‘Ālamiyyūn [The Eastern Light: Adūnīs in the Eye of International Intellectuals and Poets] Damascus: Dār al-Ṭalī‘a, 2004: 177-179.

• “‘Poète des secrets et des racines’: L’Adonis hallajien”. Adonis: un poète dans le monde d’aujourd’hui 1950-2000. Paris: Institut du monde arabe, 2000: 171-172.

• Religion, Mysticism and Modern Arabic Literature. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006.

• “A Study of ‘Elegy for al-Ḥallāj’ by Adūnīs”. Journal of Arabic Literature 25.2, 1994: 245-256.

References[link]

• Irwin, Robert "An Arab Surrealist". The Nation, January 3, 2005, 23–24, 37–38.

External links[link]

• Works by or about Adunis in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Profile at Al-Bab.com
• Profile at Looklex Encyclopaedia
• Adunis on Charlie Rose
• Adonis auf culturebase.net
• Three Poems Translated into English, Guernica, 15 December 2007
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography of Adonis (including video clip of Khaled Mattawa reading translated Adonis poem "Celebrating Childhood")

Articles and interviews

• Tresilian, David. "A life on public view" Al Ahram Weekly, 17 January 2001
• Shatz, Adam. "An Arab Poet Who Dares to Differ", The New York Times, 13 January 2002
• Reuters. "Syrian Poet Adonis Seen as Nobel Contender", Cornell University, 1 October 2003
• Pickering, Diego Gómez. "Adonis speaks to Forward: The living legend of Arab poetry" Forward Magazine, November 2010
• Adonis on Euro-Mediterranean Dialogue: Humanity Takes Priority
• Interview with Adonis: "I'm One Hundred Percent on the Side of the Syrian Revolution"

Portals Access related topics

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