{"id":135859,"date":"2019-04-29T11:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T15:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=135859"},"modified":"2019-04-29T11:41:19","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T15:41:19","slug":"adoniss-poems-of-ruin-and-renewal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/29\/adoniss-poems-of-ruin-and-renewal\/","title":{"rendered":"Adonis\u2019s Poems of Ruin and Renewal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Adonis. Photo: Mariusz Kubik (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0)).<\/p><\/div>\n

Adonis\u2019s Songs of Mihyar the Damascene<\/em> is the central book of poems in modern Arabic literature. Published in 1961, its status in Arabic is comparable to The Waste Land<\/em> in English or Duino Elegies<\/em>\u00a0in German. (Adonis collaborated on a translation of Eliot\u2019s long poem while writing Mihyar<\/em>). Like those works of European high modernism, Adonis\u2019s collection is poetry of large and explicit ambitions. It evokes classical, Koranic, and Biblical sources on almost every page, even when announcing its own originality. It is a work of visionary exultation and powerful melancholy. It imagines a world of blight and barrenness and picks through the ruins for hints of resurrection.<\/p>\n

At the heart of Adonis\u2019s book is the grandly inscrutable figure of Mihyar. \u201cHe has no ancestors, his roots are in his footsteps,\u201d intones the opening \u201cPsalm.\u201d The myth of a hero who emerges from his own self-conception is central to Mihyar\u2019s persona, but no literary figure can escape precursors. Many critics have noted Mihyar\u2019s resemblance to the eleventh-century poet, Mihyar al-Daylami, a Zoroastrian convert to Shiism whose poems were celebrated and censored for their extravagant metaphors (extravagant even by the standards of classical Arabic). Others have pointed to Nietzsche\u2019s immoralist prophet, Zarathustra, who preached the death of God, the coming of the superman, and the eternal return of the same. Mihyar is certainly a figure of extravagance. \u201cHe is the physics of things, he knows them and gives them names he does not divulge.\u201d And Mihyar is clearly a heretical prophet. He rejects the very premise of monotheism and is as likely to spurn his flock as to give it counsel. When he does speak, he doesn\u2019t offer parables or warnings, but rather fragments of apocalyptic lyricism:<\/p>\n

Tomorrow, tomorrow in fire and spring
\nYou\u2019ll know I\u2019m the slayer of flocks,
\nYou\u2019ll know I\u2019m the sower of seeds,
\nTomorrow, tomorrow you\u2019ll see me with
\nyour own two eyes.
\n(\u201cYour Eyes Didn\u2019t See Me\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Mihyar travels through landscapes of dust and desolation. He lives, he says, in \u201can age that crumbles like sand,\u201d \u201can age of submission and mirage,\u201d \u201can age in perpetual decline.\u201d But if the old world and its dispensations are dead or dying, traces of it still survive in Mihyar\u2019s language\u2014in the high pitch of its rhetoric, the measured cadences of its lines, the blunt force of its abstractions. The skillful translations of Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Ivan Eubanks, attuned to majesty as well as the meanings of Adonis\u2019s poems, allow us to hear these strains of modernist liturgy for the first time in English:<\/p>\n

He advances beneath a mound of clouds
\nIn a climate of unfamiliar letters,
\nBestowing his poetry on downcast winds,
\nCoarse and enchanting like copper,<\/p>\n

A language rippling among the masts,
\nThe knight of strange words.
\n(\u201cThe Knight of Strange Words\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lurking in the background of Adonis\u2019s collection is an old and heretical dream, one that periodically springs to life through the history of Arabic literature: the dream of writing poetry that rivals the Koran in beauty and perfection. The eleventh-century skeptic Abu \u2018Ala\u2019 al-Ma\u2018arri, whose verse Adonis has helped to translate into French, set himself this task in the homiletic fragments of his Kitab al-fusul wa-l-ghayat<\/em> (The Book of Middles and Ends<\/em>). Some forty years after writing Mihyar<\/em>, Adonis published the three volumes of al-Kitab<\/em> (The Book<\/em>), an enormous poem-qua-history (as yet untranslated into English) whose title makes its ambitions clear: with a definite article and no qualification, al-kitab<\/em>\u00a0is a synonym for the Koran. So it\u2019s no surprise that Mihyar\u2019s typical accoutrements are pens, ink, and notebooks. From the shipwreck of history, he rescues the remnants of literature.<\/p>\n

Not just rescues\u2014transforms. The pages of Mihyar<\/em> are full of retellings, in which traditional stories are reversed or complicated. In one of the collection\u2019s best-known poems, \u201cThe New Noah,\u201d the mythical sailor and seed-bearer\u2014a figure common to all three monotheistic faiths\u2014decides not to renew mankind\u2019s covenant with God. Instead of making land, he steers his ship back to sea and dives beneath the waves, communing with the unbelievers whom God has attempted to exterminate. In \u201cShaddad,\u201d the city of Iram, named in the Koran as a site of mankind\u2019s impenitence (an analogue of sorts to Sodom an Gomorrah), becomes a locus of heroic dissent. And in the suite of short elegies at the collection\u2019s close, Adonis traces a genealogy of classical poets who were censored and executed by the authorities of their time, inserting himself into their company. This type of revisionary rereading is a trademark of Adonis\u2019s poetry and criticism. Many of his books are exploratory digs into Arab and Islamic history, from which he extracts resources for the present.<\/p>\n

Because the language of Mihyar<\/em> is so often ceremonial and opaque\u2014the poems read at first like sermons delivered in the style of French symbolism\u2014it is easy to miss its playful side. The world of these poems is built from a relatively small number of nouns: clouds, mirrors, stones, lightning bolts, eyelids. These thing-words are repeated so often they acquire a kind of hieroglyphic solidity. We seem to be in the allegorical world of medieval etchings, where each object points toward a conventional meaning we can only dimly understand. But Mihyar\u2019s world is not the fixed and frozen world of allegory. Instead, it is one of continual transformation. Mihyar, \u201cthe physics of things,\u201d is a principle of flux; his world is one in which all hierarchies are on the verge of reversal. The thrill of reading these poems doesn\u2019t come from deciphering them, but rather from the discovery of a world whose elements change before our eyes, in which a stone can become an idol, a mirror, or a page of verse:<\/p>\n

I worship this tranquil stone;
\nI saw my face in its lines,
\nI saw my lost poetry in it.
\n(\u201cStone\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many of the poems collected in Mihyar<\/em> were initially published in the legendary magazine Shi\u2018r<\/em> (Poetry<\/em>), a Beirut-based quarterly founded in 1957, which set the terms of poetic modernism in Arabic. Beirut had recently become the hub of intellectual life in the Arab world, a refuge with weak censorship laws for disaffected thinkers from across the region. During the quarter century before the outbreak of civil conflict in 1975, Beirut was home to every strain of intellectual and political life in the region, from the Communist left to the Fascist right. Shi\u2018r<\/em> magazine did its best to eschew these debates. It hewed to a peculiarly midcentury notion of what poetic modernism was\u2014an austere ideal of artistic heroism, aesthetic abstraction, and the avoidance of ideology. Shi\u2018r<\/em> didn\u2019t traffic in cultural criticism and went out of its way to avoid political debates, though one might argue this aloofness is itself a characteristic attitude of liberal politics. The Shi\u2018r <\/em>poets\u2019 ostensible lack of ideology put them at odds with their peers in Beirut and around the region, where engag\u00e9 poetry of the nationalist or Marxist sort was de rigeur. The Adamic isolation of Mihyar is a pointed response to the verse of these more militant poets, who tended to heroize collectives rather than individuals, and who imagined that poetry could awaken the masses.<\/p>\n

The modernist poets at Shi\u2018r<\/em> were hardly political naifs. Many of the magazine\u2019s editors, including Adonis, once belonged to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a grouping that envisaged a \u201cGreater Syria\u201d encompassing Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. Adonis\u2019s earliest poetry, much of it uncollected even in Arabic, delves into Near Eastern myth (\u201cAdonis\u201d is the Hellenic name for the Babylonian deity Tammuz) and heralds the rebirth of this idealized Syria. His militancy resulted in exile in 1956 and left him with a lasting suspicion of nationalist styles of thought. In cosmopolitan Beirut, Adonis and his fellow modernists hoped to escape into the international scene of modernist art. Shi\u2018r<\/em> magazine published a striking amount of poetry in translation. The first issue included an Arabic version of Ezra Pound\u2019s first Canto (i.e., the English translation of a Latin translation of Homer), and subsequent numbers included translations of poems by Dickinson, Rilke, Eliot, Val\u00e9ry, Michaux, Lorca, and Octavio Paz. In his later career, Adonis translated the works of Saint-John Perse and Yves Bonnefoy into Arabic. His encounter with Perse, in particular, is felt in the ecstatic solemnity of Mihyar<\/em>\u2019s\u201cPsalms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Songs of Mihyar the Damascene<\/em> echoes with a dizzying range of voices, classical and contemporary, familiar and foreign. Adonis\u2019s poetry has always rejected any airtight notion of culture or epoch. One might say that Mihyar\u2019s originality ultimately lies in his radical openness to so many historical influences and confluences. Mihyar\u2019s \u201csongs\u201d are at once psalms, new testaments, and Koranic retellings. The landscape he strides through is a compost of faiths and histories, shaped by the Barada and Euphrates rivers, dotted with Sufi tekkes<\/em> and Christian churches, overlooked by Beirut\u2019s Mount Sannine. Over the whole scene ring out the bells of reckoning. This is, in other words, a recognizably Syrian landscape, though the Syria of our own time is infinitely bleaker and more broken. In the face of today\u2019s violent fractures, sectarian and otherwise, it is worth emphasizing the generous syncretism of Adonis\u2019s early and best verse. These are poems of transitions and translations, ruin and renewal, of things turning ceaselessly into other things. Here they are, reborn into English.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robyn Creswell teaches comparative literature at Yale University and is the translator of Sonallah Ibrahim\u2019s <\/em>That Smell and Abdelfattah Kilito\u2019s <\/em>The Clash of Images and <\/em>The Tongue of Adam.<\/em><\/p>\n

Introduction from<\/em>\u00a0Songs of Mihyar the Damascene<\/a>, by Adonis, translated by Kareem Abu Zeid and Ivan Eubanks \u00a9 New Directions. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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