January 4, 2004

SYRIAN poet and literary critic Adonis, a pen name adopted by Ali Ahmad Said, was tipped as front-runner for the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, ultimately losing out to the South African, Coetzee. As a consequence, while very well-known in the Arab world, Adonis has become a subject of much interest in the rest of the literary world.

If you want an insight into this brilliant poet, go to www.jehat.com for the best of Adonis’ poetry and critical essays. This website is dedicated to Arab writers and provides links to much of their work as well as biographies and interviews. Some scholarly treatises are also included on each of them. It is the most ‘user friendly’ site on Adonis.

Adonis adopted his pseudonym early in his career, “At the time I adopted the name Adonis as a sobriquet, I was resuming my studies at the high school of Ladhkia, and was 17. I wrote texts in poetry and prose which I signed with my ordinary name: Ali Ahmad Said. I used to send them out to newspapers and magazines, but none of them were published. This went on for a while, and made me angry and depressed.

“In one of those moments of anger and depression, I picked up a magazine (probably Lebanese), and read an essay about the legend of Adonis: he was so beautiful that the goddess Ishtar fell in love with him, and how he was killed by a wild boar, and resurrected in spring of each year. I was fascinated by the legend, and told myself: ‘From now on, I will borrow the name of Adonis and sign with it my name. These newspapers and magazines that don’t publish me will be just like that wild pig who killed Adonis.’

“So I wrote a poem, signed it with my new name and sent it off to a paper that wouldn’t publish me. They published it this time.” But the myth also crystallizes the idea of spiritual renewal and resurrection which Adonis, the poet, asserts in “Resurrection and ashes” :

“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?”

However, of himself Adonis says, “Being a poet means that I have actually written but that I have actually written nothing. Poetry is an act without a beginning or an end. It is really a promise of a beginning, a perpetual beginning.”

Adonis was born Ali Ahmad Sa’id in Al Qassabin, near the city of Ladhkia, in Syria. His father was a farmer and imam. The village teacher taught Adonis to read and write, but he did not attend school, or see 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. In 1944 Adonis entered the French Lycie at Tartus, graduating in 1950. In the same year Adonis published his first collection of verse, Dalila. Adonis studied law and philosophy at the Syrian University in Damascus, and served two years in the army.

Harassed for his political views, Adonis spent part of his service in jail. After leaving his native country in 1956, Adonis settled with his wife, the literary critic Khalida Sa’id, in Lebanon, becoming a Lebanese citizen. With his friend, Yusuf Al-Khal, he founded the poetry magazine Shi’ir, which introduced modernistic ideas into Arabic poetry. Its first issue was banned in several Arab countries. Adonis has been a resident of Paris since 1985.

“The sun made me the same as trees,/ As rivers, as the poor./Ask the sun how it made me an exile./ It scattered me on the road,/ Letter by letter,/ And the languages of exile/ Are not the sun’s languages./ I have thus become a wanderer./ To be an exile is my identity”

As stated earlier, the jehat site contains work by other renowned Arab poets as well, for as the editors put it, “Jihat al-Shi’r devotes its energies to the voyage of Modern Arabic Poetry in its rich manifestations and transformations... The possibilities provided by new technologies represent for the poet’s imagination the transparent yet powerful wings that can enhance the creative imagination and encourage it to roam higher and higher in the spaces of creativity... in the freedom and beauty that the space of the Internet generates. After centuries of solidly erected barriers, manifested in numerous forms, in the face of creative communication and exploration, nothing remains now in this fascinating blueness except that horizon which seduces us to roam high and to adventure...”

Their aim, they say, is “to open up for poetry, art and creativity all the horizons that it is in our power to open up, horizons that dreamers (in their various arts) have never ceased to outline and construct with their words, lines and colours, and to guard these horizons, as though they were our only and last provisions, with constant, unflinching alertness.”

Undoubtedly one of the greatest poets in Arabic literature, Adonis is also something of an iconoclast. His prose writings have aroused much controversy in the Arab world, particularly his views on Arab heritage and writings. Many of his critical essays are published in the London based newspaper Al-Hayat. Elie Chalala, the editor of Al-Jadid has written extensively on Adonis. To read these pieces you can log on to www.aljadid.com. Readers have been introduced to this site in an earlier piece.

Adonis believes poetry is driven by a social functionalism expressed in two main directions, “one ideological of religious origin and the other musical, in the form of singing and tarab”. In other words poetry must serve a cause and ideology in the first case. It must also — in fact this is the more keenly felt and popularly enjoyed function — serve the purpose of providing sheer pleasure and jubilation. Ideally the two functions concur — this is the goal of poetry.

Stripped of seasons, buds and fields,/ I leave so little to the sands,/ Less to the wind/ And nothing to the day’s hosanna/ But the blood of youth./ In tune with heaven,/ I hear the chiming of ascending wings/ And name the earth my prophet/ ...

With springs of dust in my blood/ I sit all day in this cafi/ And wait for someone/ to remember me/

Seven collections of his poetry have appeared, of which Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (1960) may be regarded as a turning point in his work.

Not A Star/ Neither a star,/ nor a prophet’s inspiration,/ nor a face praying to the moon, is Mihyar./ Here he comes/ like a pagan spear,/ invading the land of letters,/ bleeding/ and raising to the sun his bleeding./ Here he is,/ wearing the nakedness of stone/ and praying to the caves./ Here he is,/ cuddling the light Earth.

The contradictory forces operating on Adonis’ poetry and tearing its structures apart are well evident in his treatment of history. His vision of Arab history appears predominantly tragic. Here is a history, which in his view can only produce death and violence and destruction. Yet, Adonis, perhaps more than any other living poet, has uncovered in this very history of death such powerful and lasting voices of creativity, love, longing, estrangement, loss, search, quest, indeed all that represents the very impulses that he aspires to enshrine in culture.

Adonis writes also of al-Ghazali and al-Niffari, one the epitome of the Imam upholding traditional beliefs and modes of existence, the other a Sufi rebel and destroyer of the conventional language, visions and accepted wisdom.

Equally important is the leading role he played in revolutionizing poetic language, imagery, and approach. Addressing Baghdad, he says, “...In the past, those who lived on its two banks were non-monotheistic people, but regardless, they were more humane and more creative than their grandchildren who are besieging you today. I love this moment. I say: Baghdad — half of it is forest, the other half is desert. / And I love to ask my friend, whispering: What is the difference between Baghdad 1258 and 1969?/ — The first was ravaged by the Tartars/ — The second by its own children/ —Baghdad is heaven!/ —Man is heaven, not the place ...I saw how language transformed itself into a huge army of ferocious animals. And I was, until that moment of 1969, tired of distinguishing between people, devils, and gods when I looked at those in charge of state in Iraq. Perhaps because of this I felt perpetually cold in Baghdad, even when I was in the embrace of the sun.”

The first collection of Adonis’ verses 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). His latest collections available in English are The Pages of Night and Day ( 2000) and If Only the Sea Could Sleep (2003).

Adonis has built bridges between Western influences and Arabic, Greek and biblical tradition. “The west is another name for the east”. Western materialism, which he rejects, is his target in “A Grave for New York”. The poem was based on his visit to the city. 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.”

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”.

However, Adonis’ formative years were strongly influenced by the teachings of Antun Sa’ada, and by the new poetic sensibility which had been developed by such poets as Jibran Kahlil Jibran, Ilyas Abu Shabaka, Sa’id ‘Aql and Salah Labaki. It is to Sa’ada that he owes his awareness of the importance for poetry of myth and history — poetry being seen by Adonis and many of his contemporaries as having a vital role in the response to the challenge of the West.

Particularly after the loss of Palestine in 1948, the ‘new poetry’ began its ascendance, taking the form initially of a rebellion against traditional rhythmic and prosodic forms. Both as a poet and a theorist on poetry, and as a thinker with a radical vision of Arab culture, Adonis has exercised a powerful influence both on his contemporaries and on younger generations of Arab poets. His name has become synonymous with the hadatha (modernism) which his poetry embodies.

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