If Only the Sea Could Sleep

by Adonis, Mirene Ghossien (Introduction), أدونيس

One of the greatest poets of Arab literature, Adonis’s work often centers on the process of poetic creation, but his work has somehow remained highly appealing to Arab readers, and his has had, perhaps, more influence in terms of innovation and modernity than any other contemporary Arab poet. Twice he has been a finalist for the Nobel Prize. For Adonis, poetry is a vision (ru’ya") a "leap outside of established concepts, a change in the order of things and in the way we look at them."

Selected from Al-A’mul al Shi’riyya, 1-3 (The Complete Works, 3 volumes) the current book explores the great Syrian poet’s oeuvre more than any other previous collection in English.

Genres: Poetry, Literature

150 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1999

About the author

Adonis was born Ali Ahmed Said in the village of Al Qassabin in Syria, in 1930, to a family of farmers, the oldest of six children. At the age of nineteen, he adopted the name Adonis (also spelled Adunis), after the Greek god of fertility, with the hopes that the new name would result in newspaper publication of his poems.

Although his family could not afford to send Adonis to school, his father taught him to read poetry and the Qu'ran, and memorize poems while he worked in the fields. When he was fourteen, Adonis read a poem to the president of Syria who was visiting a nearby town. The impressed president offered to grant a request, to which the young Adonis responded that he wanted to attend school. The president quickly made arrangements for Adonis to attend a French-run high school, after which he studied philosophy at Damascus University.

In 1956, after a year-long imprisonment for political activities, Adonis fled Syria for Beirut, Lebanon. He joined a vibrant community of artists, writers, and exiles in Beirut, and co-founded and edited Sh'ir, and later Muwaqaf, both progressive journals of poetry and politics. He studied at St. Joseph University in Beirut and obtained his Doctorat d'Etat in 1973.

Considered one of the Arab world's greatest living poets, Adonis is the author of numerous collections, including Mihyar of Damascus (BOA Editions, 2008), A Time Between Ashes and Roses (Syracuse University Press, 2004); If Only the Sea Could Sleep (2003); The Pages of Day and Night (2001); Transformations of the Lover (1982); The Book of the Five Poems (1980); The Blood of Adonis (1971), winner of the Syria-Lebanon Award of the International Poetry Forum; Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (1961), Leaves in the Wind (1958), and First Poems (1957). He is also an essayist, an editor of anthologies, a theoretician of poetics, and the translator of several works from French into Arabic.

Over the course of his career, Adonis has fearlessly experimented with form and content, pioneering the prose poem in Arabic, and taking a influential, and sometimes controversial role in Arab modernism. In a 2002 interview in the New York Times, Adonis declared: '"There is no more culture in the Arab world. It's finished. Culturally speaking, we are a part of Western culture, but only as consumers, not as creators."

Adonis's awards and honors include the first ever International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award, and the Highest Award of the International Poem Biennial in Brussels. He was elected as Stephen Mallarme Academy Member in Paris in 1983. He has taught at the Lebanese University as a professor of Arabic literature, at Damascus University, and at the Sorbonne. He has been a Lebanese citizen since 1961 and currently lives in Paris.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/...

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Father than the dream we journeyed
Father than the heart we loved
*

but days stuck to days and nights to nights and still between us the distance remained
*
I appeal to my time for a delay so I can become a verse which
speaks in the name of
love
*
I snatch myself from you/ I cling to you
between you and me I create
a lie as high as the sun
a duplicity which breaks time
branch after branch/
*
Overwhelmed
I enter the desert of anxiety calling your name
[…]
I hear strange words
They become gardens, stones, waves, waves
And flowers of celestial thorns.
*
I consider myself a wave and you the shore
*
“how many centuries deep is your wound?”
*
Now we may wonder how we met
now we may decipher the road of return
and say: seashores are abandoned
and masts are
news of a wreck.

Now we can bow and say
we came to an end.

[m]

i’ve read so much translated arabic poetry and i’ve always found myself enjoying the roughness of the translations, but this was almost unreadable to me? idk what it is but i’ll find the arabic ver eventually and read that instead

[Katie]

‘My face was evening,
Your eyelashes morning,
Your head is a pillow,
mine an erupting volcano,
I slept between your eyelashes’

Sigh.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy being able to see the evolution of a poet from their earliest works to their latest and this was no different. I also keep in mind that translations from the original language always have a certain lack to them and I am glad that the translators acknowledge this beforehand. That said, I found the work within interesting, with a lot of playful sounds and imagery leading up to a visceral expression of erotic love and desire. I'm still chewing on some of the phrases in this and I think I will be for awhile.

[Mehwish · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I love you
as if all hearts were a mirror of mine
as if life were invented for my love"

"An infant beneath my garment cries love love
Tearfully, intoxicated
Weary he bears the path
Trees are his lamp and the air his tower and bell
His love races ahead of the wind
Flying into the limitless
towards the sky the sky the sky"

"..How can a single body bear jasmine and boxthorn
how can a single heart wear two bodies?"

If only I could feel it in Arabic as well!

[Evelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

how many centuries deep is your wound?

Visceral, vivid, evocative. It is a crime this is not more widely read. While I wish I could read Arabic so I could taste the original words, the translated poems are still a marvel: they brim with playful, sensual love phrases and primeval, grand natural imagery that mirror the intricacies and soft-spokenness of romance and sex. Adonis' words are sand in an hourglass, minute and elegant.

[Lauren 罗云 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I engraved your limbs with the embers of mine
I wrote you on my lips and my fingers
I carved you on my brow, altered the letters and the spellings
I multiplied the readings.
___________

My days are her name

The dreams, when the sky is sleepless
over my sorrow, are her name
The obsession is her name
and the wedding, when slayer and sacrifice embrace
is her name.
___________

My love is a wound
my body a rose upon the wound to be plucked by death,
a branch surrendered of its leaves and settled.

I entered your basin holding a city beneath my grief
what transforms the green branch into a snake
the sun into a dark lover.
[...]
I am night and day a lull in time
in our fusion
strike roots into my loss.
___________

I will one day know enough Arabic to be able to come back to this one and really take in the fullness, the breadth of his words.

[Ivan Gales · Rating 5 out of 5]

for project

[Kyle Foley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adonis is one of the greatest poets alive today. His imagery merges the moon with the sun, his subject matter makes Mephisto food for worms, and his syntax is a horse galloping on wind.

[\tonio]

half for the present
half for the absent/

[Irwan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must admit that I dont completely understand this work. It definitely needs rereading later, and the rating might change.
So far it seems like intersections. Several realms, represented by the abundant metaphors, intersect. Sadly, I am pretty much in the dark of what they are. But somehow the intersections do feel good, though.

[Cep Deni]

i want to read this book. because for to writing my skripsi.