São Paulo – The Syrian poet Adonis will participate in the upcoming edition of the Paraty International Literary Festival (Flip, in the Portuguese acronym), due July 4 to 8 in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Adonis, whose real name is Ali Ahmad Said Esber, will also travel to São Paulo for a talk with the audience at the theatre of the Cultura bookstore, on Paulista Avenue, by invitation of the Institute of Arab Culture (Icarabe) on July 9 at 5:00 pm.
One of the reasons for the poet’s visit is the Brazilian release of his “Adonis [poems]” book, by the Companhia das Letras publishing house. The book will arrive at Brazilian stores on July 29 and was translated by Michel Sleiman, with a preface by the writer Milton Hatoum. The book is an anthology, selected by Sleiman, of poems written from 1954 to 1968, 1970 to 1985, and from 1994 to 2003.
Adonis is based in Paris and regarded as the most important living poet in modern Arabic lyric poetry. Known for his modern, elegant style, he has had works published in 22 and moved to Paris in 1980 to flee the civil war in Lebanon, where he lived. In France, he was an Arabic professor at Sorbonne. The Syrian poet won the 2011 Goethe Prize for “having transposed the achievements of European modernism to Arab cultural circles,” according to information from the Flip press office.
One of Adonis’ best known works is The Songs of Mihyâr, the Damascan, from the 1960s. In the 1970s, he wrote The Static and the Dynamic, among other works. He holds a degree in Philosophy from the Damascus University. His studies there matched the period when he first started writing his poems. He was born in 1930 in the small Syrian village of Kassabin, and from an early age his father had him recite and memorize poems. Adonis also has Lebanese citizenship, due to the fact that he lived in Beirut for a few years.
At the Flip, Adonis will speak in the “Literature and Freedom” debate, on July 6, alongside a Lebanese writer, also French-based, named Amin Maalouf. “A modern, humanistic outlook characterizes the work of Syria’s Adonis and Lebanon’s Amin Maalouf as writers and intellectuals. In essays, poems, historical studies, or fiction books, these two great writers build the new out of a fresh take of tradition, in direct opposition to the fundamentalism which has marked political and cultural life in Arab countries over the last decades,” says the Flip website.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
