Poetry
Songs of Mihyar the Damascene
أغاني مهيار الدمشقي
Adonis · 1961
Synopsis
Seven parts, including The Knight of Strange Words, The Dust Charmer, The Dead God and Iram of the Pillars, opened by the portrait of Mihyar, a Damascene of whom almost nothing is known. He advances alone in the desert, without ancestors, his roots in his footsteps, in flight. Around him, the poet breaks with the old god, celebrates the wound that grows in a history that is too narrow, and makes speech a fire turned against dogma, between the Arab mystics and the modern poets of the West.
Context
Third collection by its author, published in Beirut in 1961, the book is regarded as the summit of Arab poetic modernism. It draws both on Hölderlin, Rilke or Eliot and on the mystics Hallaj and Niffari. In French, Anne Wade Minkowski published twenty-three of its poems with Arfuyen, and a translation with Jacques Berque then appeared in paperback with Gallimard in 2002. English has two, that by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, and then that by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Ivan Eubanks.
Who it is for
A difficult collection, made up of poems of uneven length and form; a bilingual translation helps in following the images.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's major work and as a turning point in modern Arabic poetry; Edward Said saw in Adonis the spokesman of this modernity.