Adonis’s Poems of Ruin and Renewal
Adonis. Photo: Mariusz Kubik (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)).
Adonis’s Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is the central book of poems in modern Arabic literature. Published in 1961, its status in Arabic is comparable to The Waste Land in English or Duino Elegies in German. (Adonis collaborated on a translation of Eliot’s long poem while writing Mihyar). Like those works of European high modernism, Adonis’s collection is poetry of large and explicit ambitions. It evokes classical, Koranic, and Biblical sources on almost every page, even when announcing its own originality. It is a work of visionary exultation and powerful melancholy. It imagines a world of blight and barrenness and picks through the ruins for hints of resurrection.
At the heart of Adonis’s book is the grandly inscrutable figure of Mihyar. “He has no ancestors, his roots are in his footsteps,” intones the opening “Psalm.” The myth of a hero who emerges from his own self-conception is central to Mihyar’s persona,
