Poetry, Translations

Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs

"The poems in this collection, Miyhar of Damascus, His Songs (Aghânî Mihyâr al-dimashqî,) established a new direction in Arabic poetry, comparable to that series of breaks with traditional styles we find elsewhere at early moments in the history of modernisms: Mallarmé or Apollinaire in France, Ezra Pound in the Anglophone world, Ungaretti in Italy, Sikelianos or Seferis in Greece. Adonis's early poems in traditional metrics demonstrate his mastery of the recurring rhythms and monorhyme: but Mihyar shattered that. The authoritative aesthetic break carried out in this book is a break from within. After Mihyar in 1961 there would be many additional leaps into experimental new forms: Mufrad bi-sîghat al jam‘ (Singular in plural form, 1977), for instance, in which words are scattered across the page in the manner of Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés,” generating a pictorial force no less powerful than their sound, or most recently Al-Kitâb (The book, 1995), in which multiple voices combine surprisingly. Al-Kitâb takes the form of a poem in the center of the page, flanked by marginal comments on it by fictional critics, going down the page in dialogue. Al-Kitâb may be Adonis's most striking recent creation, but the poems of Mihyar constitute the initial, definitive disruption."--Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, from the Introduction "The availability in English of this seminal, startling, volatile, founding work of Arabic-language modernism is a welcome literary event...Adonis excels both in stately free verse and in the prose poems he calls 'Psalms'... [he] is likely the most original Arabic poet of his generation."--Publishers Weekly

The Earth

How often you have said to me
"I have another country,"
your palms filling with tears
and your eyes
filling with lightning
from where the borders keep edging closer.

Did your eyes know that the earth,
whenever it cried or cheered your footsteps,
here where you have sung, or there,
that it knows every passerby but you
and knows itself to be one,
dried up breasts, dry inside,
and that it doesn't know the ritual of rejection?

Did your eyes realize
that you yourself are the earth?

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2008
Available editions:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-934414-09-5
Price: $25.50
Publishing Date: July 2008
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-934414-08-8
Price: $16.00
Publishing Date: July 2008

FormatPaperback , Hardcover

Publication DateJuly 1, 2008

ISBN978-1-934414-08-8

From $16.00

About the Author

Adonis

The pen-name Adonis, which Ali Ahmad Said began to use in the early 60s, refers to the mythological figures of the Mediterranean which interested Arab poets of the Tammuzi school in that period, the dying gods we know from the archaic mythologies of Egypt, Phoenicia and Greece. Born in 1930, Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) mastered traditional poetic forms very early as a child in Syria. Later, in Lebanon, he became a pivotal figure in the new poetry which began to appear in the influential magazine Mawâqif, which he edited with Yûsif al-Khâl starting in 1968. By that time he had established himself, through poems like those in Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, as a writer who was thinking of new possibilities in Arabic poetry. Especially in Aghânî Mihyâr Dimishqî, Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs (1963), Adonis forged a new set of possibilities for Arabic poetry, writing in traditional meters but directing them towards a kind of modernism which rethought every possibility of rhythm, style, and conceptual complexity. Adonis has acted as visiting professor to a variety of institutions including Damascus University, Princeton University, and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. In 1986 he was nominated Permanent Assistant Delegate to the Arab League at UNESCO. He currently lives in Paris.

Adnan Haydar

Adnan Haydar is head of the Arabic section in the Department of Foreign Languages and professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the University of Arkansas, where he also directed the King Fahd Middle East Studies Program from 1993 to 1999. His books include translations of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s The Ship and In Search of Walid Masoud (with Roger Allen). He frequently collaborates with Michael Beard on translations of Arabic poetry, including Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs (BOA Editions, 2008); they are coeditors of The Middle East Translation Series for Syracuse University Press.

Michael Beard

Michael Beard teaches in the English Department at the University of North Dakota. He is the author of a book on the Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat, Hedayat’s Blind Owl and the West (1990), and has translated from Persian two volumes of short poems by Abbas Kiarostami, Walking with the Wind (with Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, 2001), and A Wolf Lying in Wait / Gorgi dar kamin (with the late Karim Emami, 2005). He frequently collaborates with Adnan Haydar on translations of Arabic poetry, including Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs (BOA Editions, 2008); they are coeditors of The Middle East Translation Series for Syracuse University Press.