
Songs of Mihyar the Damascene
by Adonis
Title:
Songs of Mihyar the Damascene
Author:
Adonis
Series (if any):
Penguin Modern Classics
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
256 pages
Publisher:
Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN-13:
9780241483558
EAN:
9780241483558
Publication Date:
25/02/2021
Classifications:
Poetry
Weight (g):
314
Dimensions (mm):
196 x 130 x 17
Publication Country:
United Kingdom
Language:
English
Condition:
New
Description
''The greatest living poet of the Arab world'' GuardianCloud, 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





















