Adonis

Abstract

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa`id) (b. 1930) is one of the most influential and dominant Arab poets of the modern era and a perennial Nobel contender since the late 1980s. A number of his individual works have been ably and beautifully translated into English in previous decades by Samuel Hazo and Shawkat Toorawa. More recently, Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard translated Adonis’s most powerful and enduring work, Aghani Mihyar alDimashqi (1961), as Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs. However, a book of selections spanning Adonis’s entire oeuvre since the late 1950s is still lacking in English. The volume under review was an ambitious attempt to remedy this conspicuous gap in the Anglophone world. The pieces in Selected Poems were chosen from fourteen individual works published between 1957 and 2008, and fill almost four hundred pages. Adonis’s early and mid-career works have stood the test of time, but even his most ardent fans would agree that his later works, those written in the past two decades, lack his legendary verve. The exception is the multivolume al-Kitab (The Book), a poetic journey through Arab history and culture narrated by its greatest poet, the tenthcentury al-Mutanabbi. Adonis began working on it in the mid1970s and published the first of its four volumes in 1995. Mattawa decided not to include any excerpts from al-Kitab because, as he states in the introduction to Selected Poems: “no small sample . . . would offer an adequate sense of the work’s scope” (xxiv). This is not very convincing. There is no doubt that al-Kitab is complex and challenging, but a representative excerpt or excerpts would have enriched this book. The first volume of al-Kitab has been translated and published in French and the second is forthcoming from Seuil. Selections from three of Adonis’s later works (Prophesy, O Blind One [2003], Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea [2003], and Printer of the Planets’ Books [2008]), all written in the past decade or so, take up a hundred pages, almost one-fourth of the whole book. Some of this space could have been better served by featuring further selections from earlier and more enduring works. One would expect a bibliography of the original Arabic works and editions the translator used, but there is none. The translator’s short introduction includes a few glitches. Adonis never advocated the use of dialect in poetry (xvi). On the contrary, his disagreements over this issue caused a major rift with Yusuf al-Khal (1917–87), and Adonis eventually left Shi`r, the pioneering journal the two had co-founded in Beirut. The names of major classical Arab poets who influenced Adonis are mistransliterated; “Abu Nawwas” (ix, 396) should be “Abu Nuwas,” “al-Mutannabi” (ix, xix, xx, xi) should be “alMutanabbi,” and “al-Ma`ari” (xix, xxi, 274, 395) should be “alMa`arri.” So are classical terms such as “al-Mu`tazala” (xii) (group of rational thinkers), which should be “al-Mu`tazila.” Even the title of Adonis’s most famous collection is wrong; “Ughniyat” (xvi) should be “Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi” (“The Songs of Mihyar of Damascus”). On their own these are minor errors, but, alas, they are symptomatic of serious misreadings of the short vowels in scores of words in the original Arabic in many of the poems throughout this volume. Moreover, four hundred pages of poetry, much of which has references to, and is in conversation with, figures from ArabIslamic history and Islamic mysticism, produces only four pages of notes. This is far too meager and could have been expanded to illuminate the context and intertexts of many a poem for the benefit of the reader. One example out of many is when Adonis includes a line from al-Ma`arri (973–1058): “Jasadi khirqatun tukhatu ila ‘l-ardi / faya kha’ita ‘l-`awalimi khitni” (My body is a rag being sewn to the earth / O you who sew the worlds, sew me). This is rendered “The body is a rag dragged on earth / Walls of the world, support me” (278), a rendering semantically way off the mark. “Kha’it” (one who sews) becomes “ha’it” (wall) and “khitni” (sew me) becomes “support me.” A note on al-Ma`arri’s poem and the particular notion of man’s return to dust would have helped the reader. When Adonis embeds lines from the eighth-century `Abdulrahman al-Dakhil in his poem, the reader is not told and is left to think they are Adonis’s (68). The same occurs in “Body” from “Singular in Plural Form.” Adonis references two lines from al-Tawhidi (930– 1023): “Zahiri muntathirun la amluku minhu shay`an / wa batini musta`irun la ajidu lahu fay`an,” but there is no note pointing this out and the meaning is completely lost on the translator. Instead of something like “My exterior is scattered and I possess none of it / My interior burns and I can find no shade for it,” we get the following: “my surfaces spread and I own none of them / my insides reduced no place in them for me to live” (125). Adonis’s poetry often employs Qur’anic references and metaphors. These escape the translator, too, and are mistranslated. For example, in “Concerto for 11th September,” “sundus Allah” is translated “cedars of God” (303), but “sundus” means “silk” or “brocade” and appears three times in the Qur’an. The Qur’naic Lote tree (Qur’an 53:14) “sidrat alMuntaha” also becomes “cedar.”