“The most daring and provocative Arab poet of our time.”
—EDWARD W. SAID
Adonis, whose In Memory of Vague and Indistinct Things we previously published in Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s translation, is widely regarded as the most influential living Arab poet. In This Is My Name, we encounter an Adonis who transgresses the boundary between prose and poetry yet never, in the course of this transgression, allows us to forget that he is first and foremost a poet.
As Suçin explains of the poetics essay that opens the volume:
“When I began writing an ‘introduction’ to Adonis’s poetics, I came to believe that penetrating his work had less to do with the text itself than with readers’ habits of reading. I therefore translated ‘The Poetics of Reading’ from his book The Politics of Poetry (Beirut, 1985) and present it here in place of an introduction.”
In that essay, Adonis offers invaluable observations on the condition of contemporary Arab poetry:
“Arab poetry today, however, confronts both a historical and an artistic problem. It is historical because this poetry is written and read during a period of transition, change, and inquiry. It is artistic because it has emerged from a particular vision of writing and from divergent, mutually contradictory attitudes towards humanity and the world. To this problem must be added an acute condition that I call the ‘phenomenon of pastism’, which dominates Arab culture in both writing and reading. Within the prevailing political order, there are factors that sustain this orientation towards the past in writing—that is, in language and aesthetics—as well as in reading—that is, in communication and use.”
This Is My Name now awaits its readers in Turkish.
“The poet’s addressee is God.”
—ADONIS