'The greatest living poet of the Arab world' Guardian\nCloud, mirror, stone, thunder, eyelid, desert, sea. Through a dead or dying land, Mihyar walks: a figure of heroic individualism and dissent, part-Orpheus, part-Zarathustra. Where he goes, the austere building-blocks of his world become the expressions of passionate emotion, of visionary exaltation and despairing melancholy. The traditions of the Ancient Greeks, the Bible and the Quran flow about and through him.\nWritten in the cosmopolitan Beirut of the early 1960s, Adonis's Songs of Mihyar the Damascene did for Arabic poetry what The Waste Land did for English. These are poems against authoritarianism and dogma, in which a new Noah would abandon his ark to dive with the condemned, and in which surrealism and Sufi mysticism meet and intertwine. The result is a masterpiece of world literature.\nTranslated by Kareem James Abu Zeid and Ivan Eubanks\n'The most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity' Edward Said

Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (Penguin Modern Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Adonis

Poetry

Penguin Classics

Poetry is the quintessence of Arab culture. In this book one of today's foremost Arab poets reinterprets a rich and ancient heritage. He examines the oral tradition of the pre-Islamic poetry of Arabia and the relationship between Arabic poetry and the Qur'an, and between poetry and thought. He also assesses the challenges of modernism and the impact of Western culture on the Arab poetic tradition. Stimulating in their originality, eloquent in their treatment of a wide range of poetry and criticism, these reflections open up fresh perspectives on one of the world's greatest--and least explored--literatures.

Introduction to Arab Poetics

Reference

Univ of Texas Pr

History & Criticism

The first major career-spanning collection of the poems of Adonis, widely acknowledged as the most important poet working in Arabic today 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.
Experimental in form and prophetic in tone, Adonis’s poetry sings exultantly of both the sweet promise of eros and the lingering problems of the self. Steeped in the anguish of exile and the uncertainty of existence, Adonis demonstrates the poet’s profound affection for Arabic and European lyrical traditions even as his poems work to destabilize those very aesthetic and moral 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.”

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

Yale University Press

A cri de cœur or fully imagined poem on the myth and history of Jerusalem/Al-Quds from the author revered as the greatest living Arabic poet At the age of eighty-six, Adonis, an Arabic poet with Syrian origins, a critic, an essayist, and a devoted secularist, has come out of retirement to pen an extended, innovative poem on Jerusalem/Al-Quds. It is a hymn to a troubled city embattled by the conflicting demands of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Adonis’s city, as a coveted land, ought to suggest the universal love of humanity; as a land of tragedy, a place of contending history and beliefs, and a locus of bitterness, conflict, hatred, rivalry, and blood. Wrapping multiple voices, historical references, and political viewpoints within his ecstatic lyricism, Adonis has created a provocative work of unique beauty and profound wisdom, beautifully rendered in English by award-winning poet Khaled Mattawa.

Concerto al-Quds (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Calling poetry a "question that begets another question," Adonis sets into motion this stream of unending inquiry with difficult questions about exile, identity, language, politics, and religion. Repeatedly mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, Adonis is a leading figure in twentieth-century Arabic poetry. Restless and relentless, Adonis explores the pain and otherness of exile, a state so complete that absence replaces identity and becomes the exile's only presence. Exile can take many forms for the Arabic poet, who must practice his craft as an outsider, separated not only from the nation of his birth but from his own language; in the present as in the past, that exile can mean censorship, banishment, or death. Through these poems, Adonis gives an exquisite voice to the silence of absence.

The Pages of Day and Night

Marlboro Press

A brilliant new translation of the landmark poetry collection by “the most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity” (Edward Said) Written in the early 1960s, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world, a radical departure from the rigid formal structures that had dominated Arabic poetry until the 1950s. Drawing not only on Western influences, such as T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, but on the deep tradition and history of Arabic poetry, Adonis accomplished a masterful and unprecedented transformation of the forms and themes of Arabic poetry, initiating a profound revaluation of cultural and poetic traditions. Songs of Mihyar is a masterpiece of world literature that rewrites―through Mediterranean myths and renegade Sufi mystics―what it means to be an Arab in the modern world.

Songs of Mihyar the Damascene

New Directions

"The Arab world's greatest living poet."—The New York Times
"Adonis is one of the most important major literary figures of our century. His vision is extraordinary, his poetry sublime . . . a master of our times."—V. S. Naipaul
At first glance, Sufism and Surrealism appear to be as far removed from one another as is possible. Adonis, however, draws convincing parallels between the two, contesting that God, in the traditional sense, does not exist in Surrealism or in Sufism, and that both are engaged in parallel quests for the nature of the Absolute, through "holy madness" and the deregulation of the senses.
This is a remarkable investigation into the common threads of thought that run through seemingly polarised philosophies from East and West, written by a man Edward Said referred to as "the most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arab modernity."
Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets and essayists of the Arab world. Born in Syria in 1930, he fled political persecution and settled in Lebanon in the 1950s, where he led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry. He has written more than thirty books in Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics, and was awarded the Goethe Prize in 2011 for his contribution to international literature. His other awards include the Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression, the Bjørnson Prize, the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, and the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award.

Sufism and Surrealism (Saqi Essentials)

World Literature

Saqi Books

An Introduction to Arab Poetics

Al Saqi

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Books by Adonis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Adonis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (Penguin Modern Classics)

Introduction to Arab Poetics

Introduction to Arab Poetics

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

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

Concerto al-Quds (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Pages of Day and Night

Songs of Mihyar the Damascene

Sufism and Surrealism (Saqi Essentials)

An Introduction to Arab Poetics