Songs of Mihyar the Damascene
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Songs of Mihyar the Damascene
（Penguin modern classics）
Penguin Classics/Penguin, 2021, c2019
- : [pbk.]
- Other Title
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Aghânî Mihiâr al-Dimashqî
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Note
Translated from the Arabic
"This translation first published in the USA by New Directions Books 2019"--T.p. verso
Description and Table of Contents
Description
'The greatest living poet of the Arab world' Guardian
Cloud, mirror, stone, thunder, eyelid, desert, sea. Through a dead or dying land, Mihyar walks: a figure of heroic individualism and dissent, part-Orpheus, part-Zarathustra. Where he goes, the austere building-blocks of his world become the expressions of passionate emotion, of visionary exaltation and despairing melancholy. The traditions of the Ancient Greeks, the Bible and the Quran flow about and through him.
Written in the cosmopolitan Beirut of the early 1960s, Adonis's Songs of Mihyar the Damascene did for Arabic poetry what The Waste Land did for English. These are poems against authoritarianism and dogma, in which a new Noah would abandon his ark to dive with the condemned, and in which surrealism and Sufi mysticism meet and intertwine. The result is a masterpiece of world literature.
Translated by Kareem James Abu Zeid and Ivan Eubanks
'The most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity' Edward Said
by "Nielsen BookData"
