"The Man Who Remade Arabic Poetry"

"Adonis’s poems reflect a lifelong argument with his culture."

"By Robyn Creswell"

"(...) The actual Jerusalem is rather different, of course—a city riven by sectarian conflict, coarsened by tourism, marred by the building of settlements and walls, and by the scars of occupation. This discrepancy between ideal and reality is the premise of Adonis’s poem, in which the heavenly archetype hovers like a mirage above the degraded modern city. The poem begins:

"Up there, up above,
look at her dangling from the sky’s throat.
Look at her fenced with the eyelashes of angels.

No one can walk toward her,
but a man can crawl on his forehead and shoulders,
perhaps even his navel.

Barefoot, knock on her door.
A prophet will open, and teach you how to march, and how to bow. (...)"

Like many of Adonis’s long poems, “Concerto al-Quds” is a bric-a-brac construction, stuffed with quotations from medieval sources—particularly Arab historians of Jerusalem—and also from religious texts and modern fiction. Verse alternates with prose, and, occasionally, the poem becomes a textual net, with fragments of phrases spaced over the page in the manner of Mallarmé (one of Adonis’s chief influences). The musical allusion in the work’s title suggests that the assembled citations are meant as background for the dissonant solos of the poet’s own voice. While the orchestral parts sustain the celestial myth of Jerusalem, Adonis insists on its earthly history. He quotes a prophetic Hadith that says, “Whoever wants to see a spot of heaven, let him gaze at al-Quds,” but his Jerusalem is “a divine cage,” a wasteland of barbed wire and demolished homes, where “corpses and severed limbs” lie strewn atop the rubble. The poem isn’t a lament for a lost paradise but an indictment of the idea that some places on earth are more holy than others. (...)" (Lido em: The New Yorker, 2017-12-14)