Adunis

Ali Ahmad Said Esber, known as Adonis, is a Syrian poet, essayist and translator born in 1930. Much of his career unfolded in Lebanon and France, and he writes in Arabic. He is widely regarded as one of the leading figures of the modernist renewal of Arabic poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, and his work remains central to any understanding of that tradition.

He was born in al-Qassabin, near the city of Latakia in north-western Syria, into a modest Alawite farming family. He had little access to formal schooling as a child. Instead he learned the Quran at the local kuttab and memorised classical Arabic verse, much of it recited to him by his father. According to a widely repeated account, he recited one of his poems before the Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli, who asked whether the boy needed anything. He replied that he wanted to go to school. He studied philosophy at the University of Damascus and graduated in 1954. During his military service he was imprisoned for membership of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a secular movement that favoured a national rather than strictly Arab project for Greater Syria.

After his release he moved to Beirut. In 1957 he co-founded the magazine Shi'r with the poet Yusuf al-Khal, which became a key forum for modern Arabic poetry and free verse. Later he launched Mawaqif in 1968, a journal that addressed the political disillusion left by the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War. His outlook shifted from Syrian nationalism towards pan-Arabism and a mystical vision with roots in Sufism, and his poems grew less overtly political. As a translator he rendered French poets such as Saint-John Perse and Yves Bonnefoy into Arabic, and he has also carried Arabic writers into French.

He taught Arabic literature at the Lebanese University from 1970 to 1985. In 1980 he went to Paris to escape the Lebanese civil war, and he taught there at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. His legacy lies in his break with traditional poetic forms and in his stance as an independent, unorthodox intellectual. He has been a recurring candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature and has won many awards, among them the Goethe Prize in 2011. Some of his poetry and essays are available in Spanish translation.