Symposium
& Festival: "The World Republic of Literature"
Lannan Symposium,
April 11-12, 2006
Gonda Theatre, Georgetown University
Adonis
Born in Qassabin, Syria in 1930 Adonis has been hailed by critics worldwide as among the most daring and significant Arab poets writing in the world today. A perennial Nobel contender, he was widely expected to have won the award in 1988 and 2005, when he was among one of the three finalists. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism, many of which have been translated in numerous languages, including Italian, English, German, Greek, Swedish, Macedonian, Vietnamese, Hebrew, and Spanish.
He is the author of over twenty books of poetry, including Leaves in the Wind (1958), Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (1961), The Pages of Day and Night (1965), Mirrors and Stage (1968), A Time between Ashes and Roses (1970), The Book of Siege (1985), A Singular in a Form of Plural (1977), Desire Advancing in the Maps of Matter (1987), Celebrating the Transparent and the Obscure (1988), Another Abcedarium (1994), The Book (3 volumes, 1995; 98; 02) Chronicles of the Wind’s Deeds (1998), Beginning of Flesh; The Ending of the Sea (2003), and Foresee Thou Blind (2003).
He has translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Jean Racine’s Phaedra, and the complete plays of Georges Schehadé into Arabic. He has also written extensively on Arabic poetics in works such as Introduction to Arab Poetics (1971), and Arab Poetics (1985), and is the author of numerous books of criticism, including Time of Poetry (1972) The Static and the Dynamic (4 volumes, 1974, 2001), Aperatures for the Endings of the Century (1980), The Politics of Poetry (1985), System and Discourse (1993), Sufism and Surrealism (1992), The Koranic Text and the Horizons of Writing (1993), The Music of the Blue Whale (2002), and The Black Ocean (2004).
He has founded and served as the editor of several literary reviews including Shi’r, which he started in Beirut 1956; and later, in 1968, he launched and edited the influential literary review Mawâqif (Positions). A writer of both regional and global significance, Adonis’s accomplishments have been recognized by a wide-range of cultural institutions in numerous nations. He received his doctorate at St. Joseph’s University in Beirut in 1973. He has taught at Princeton University, the Sorbonne, and the University of Geneva. In 1986, he was also a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University.
He has received many prestigious awards and prizes, including the Picasso Medal, the Syria-Lebanon Award of the International Poetry Forum, the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award, and the Highest Award of the International Poem Biennial in Brussels, the Goethe Prize, the Struga Prize, Macedonia, and the most prestigious award in Arab letters, Al-O’wais Award. In 1983, he was elected into the Stephan Mallarmé Academy. He currently resides in Paris, where has lived since 1986.
“Adonis's poetry has not sought to make an ideology of the beautiful by putting it in order, nor has it sought to justify what exists; still less has it sought to engage in public and verbal rebellion against what is, something which would swiftly be forgotten. Instead, it has tried to practice that ritual creativity that restores to man his name and the secret nature of his rebellion."—Gaber Asfour