Literature

Poets have always been imaginative in inventing pseudonyms. Many are not only successful, but audacious. And Ali Ahman Said, north Syrian farm hand, was most definitely audacious when he chose “Adonis” as his pen name at the age of seventeen. The newspapers and magazines where he sent his poems didn’t want to have anything to do with Ali Ahman Said, but when, on a whim, he sent them signed “Adonis”, they were published automatically. Ever since then, Ali Ahmad Said has been known as Adonis.

The choice of the name Adonis was not purely a publicity stunt. It had an undeniably influential dimension: the mythological figure of Adonis was a god of fertility. Adonis, alias Ali Ahmad Said, saw it as his mission to contribute to the renewal of Arab culture, mired in tradition as it was at the time. He managed to do so in a way that no other Arab poet has.

In late 1950’s Beirut, Adonis and other young poets started the avant garde Poetry Magazine, a forum for anyone looking to break free of the strictness and monotony of classical Arabic poetry. They looked to the works of Rimbaud, Saint-John Perse and T.S. Eliot for influence. Even today, those writers are often used as a reference when describing Adonis’ work. His poetry blends western influence and Arabic traditions, producing a unique speech of its own, and that is what makes it so fascinating. Adonis first accomplished this with his 1961 collection of poems entitled “Songs of Mihyar the Damascene”, published in Beirut. A new edition of these poems, combined with excerpts of Adonis’ later work and translated by Stefan Weidner, is set to be published in 2011 by S. Fischer Press. These works are as sensitive as they are fascinatingly peculiar. They deal with love, death, God, nature, all typical poetry themes, but at the same time the reader is drawn, line by line, verse by verse, into the search for man’s place in a very modern world, plagued by disorientation and uncertainty.

Since the first publication of “Songs of Mihyar the Damascene”, Adonis has tirelessly presented his poetic world view in the form of more than thirty books, of which a dozen have been translated into French. He now lives in Paris and in Beirut, that is, when he is not teaching at a renowned university, such as Princeton. Yet anyone who has ever been lucky enough to attend one of his poetry readings knows that the roots of his work are still firmly planted in the Orient. Few other modern Arab poets have mastered the traditional art of recitation the way that Adonis has. It is not necessary to understand Arabic in order to enjoy listening to it. It captivates all its listeners, regardless of their origins. Once you have heard it, you will not easily forget it.