Adonis

Adonis is widely considered the greatest living Arab poet. He was born in Al-Qassabin, a small town in northeast Syria, in 1930. A lifetime supporter of democracy and secularism in the Middle East, he was imprisoned in Syria for his political beliefs in the mid-1950s.  

He left his home country of Syria for Lebanon and spent most of his career as a poet, essayist and translator, traveling between Beirut and Paris. 

Born Ali Ahmad Said, he chose the pen name Adonis, after the Phoenician God of Love. He has been a contender for the Nobel Prize of literature several times. The Arab American News translates this poem by him, from Arabic, as a tribute to his literary contributions.

If the sea aged,

I would choose Beirut as its memory.

Every moment,

ashes prove they are the castle of the future.

 

The sea travels,

exits its footsteps,

enters its dreams.

For every time wisdom tames it,

experience exposes it.

It draws maps,

but the maps rip through it.

 

It closed the door,

not to suppress its happiness,

but to free its sadness.

 

Its ashes surprise the fire.

And its fire surprises time.

It denies the things that surrender to it.

Things that it surrenders to, deny it.

 

The past is a lake

to one swimmer: Memory.

The sea has no time to talk to the sand:

Always preoccupied with creating waves.

Despair is a habit. Hope is an invention.

 

Happiness has wings, but no body.

Sadness has a body, but no wings.

The dream is the only innocent one

that cannot live anywhere except in refuge.

 

Thinking always comes back.

Poetry always travels.

Secrecy is the most beautiful home,

but it is not equipped to shelter inhabitants.

 

The tongue rusts from lack of speech.

The eye rusts from lack of dreams.

Wherever I go, I travel.

Inside of yourself is the furthest of places.

 

I was injured early on.

And early on I knew,

wounds are what created me.

A small village is your childhood,

Even so, you will never cross its outskirts,

No matter how deep you travel.