The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Khaled Mattawa, Griffin Poetry Prize 2011 International Shortlist
Khaled Mattawa is assistant professor of language and literature at the University of Michigan. Born in Benghazi, Libya, he emigrated to the United States as a teenager. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Tocqueville, and has translated five books of Arab poetry. Mattawa has received a PEN award for literary translation, a Guggenheim fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. He has just been selected by the Academy of American Poets as the recipient of the 2010 Academy Fellowship.
Adonis, Griffin Poetry Prize 2011 International Shortlist
Adonis (born Ali Ahmad Said Esber) is a Syrian poet and essayist who led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the 20th century. He has written more than 20 books in his native Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics. Adonis received the Bjørnston Prize in 2007, the first International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Syria-Lebanon Best Poet Award, and the highest award of the International Poem Biennial in Brussels. Elected a member of the Stéphane Mallarmé Academy in 1983, he lives in Paris.
Judges’ Citation
“Adonis, along with Saadi Yousef and Mahmoud Darwish, has helped to bring into being modern Arabic poetry. Masterfully translated by Khaled Mattawa, his Selected Poems show a range comparable to Lorca’s, stretching from the sensuous to the political. When he left the Syrian socialist party in the early Sixties, Adonis left all traditional politics behind only to become committed to deep cultural transformation through the creative energies of poetry, in a quest for what could be called an Arabic modernism. In the case of his poetry, this new mode takes the form of a combination of metaphysics, interiority and solidarity, a hybrid present as well in the poetry of Rumi and the thought of Ibn Arabi. ‘I sang of gardens and a towering palace/while in wretchedness, in attics hid./Tell him who used to sleep on soft cushions/that the heights are being punished by a star.’ From the swooping, Whitmanesque, epic voice of the early Songs of Mihyar of Damascus, to the erotic mysticism of the long poem ‘Body’ and the subdued meditations of Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea, we are in the presence of a poet of global importance.”
Summary
Experimental in form and prophetic in tone, Adonis’s poetry sings exultantly of both the sweet promise of Eros and the lingering problems of the self. Steeped in the anguish of exile and the uncertainty of existence, Adonis demonstrates the poet’s profound affection for Arabic and European lyrical traditions even as his poems work to destabilize those very aesthetic and moral sensibilities.
Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.
Khaled Mattawa reads Celebrating Childhood from his translation of Adonis: Selected Poems
Celebrating Childhood from Adonis: Selected Poems, translated by Khaled Mattawa
Celebrating Childhood
Even the wind wants to become a cart pulled by butterflies.
I remember madness leaning for the first time on the mind’s pillow. I was talking to my body then and my body was an idea I wrote in red.
Red is the sun’s most beautiful throne and all the other colors worship on red rugs.
Night is another candle. In every branch, an arm, a message carried in space echoed by the body of the wind.
The sun insists on dressing itself in fog when it meets me: Am I being scolded by the light?
Oh, my past days - they used to walk in their sleep and I used to lean on them.
Love and dreams are two parentheses. Between them I place my body and discover the world.
Many times I saw the air fly with two grass feet and the road dance with feet made of air.
My wishes are flowers staining my days.
I was wounded early, and early I learned that wounds made me.
I still follow the child who still walks inside me.
Now he stands at a staircase made of light searching for a corner to rest in and to read the face of night again.
If the moon were a house, my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.
They are taken by dust carrying me to the air of seasons.
I walk, one hand in the air, the other caressing tresses that I imagine.
A star is also a pebble in the field of space.
He alone who is joined to the horizon can build new roads.
A moon, an old man, his seat is night and light is his walking stick.
What shall I say to the body I abandoned in the rubble of the house in which I was born? No one can narrate my childhood except those stars that flicker above it and that leave footprints on the evening’s path.
My childhood is still being born in the palms of a light whose name I do not know and who names me.
Out of that river he made a mirror and asked it about his sorrow. He made rain out of his grief and imitated the clouds.
Your childhood is a village. You will never cross its boundaries no matter how far you go.
His days are lakes, his memories floating bodies.
You who are descending from the mountains of the past, how can you climb them again, and why?
Time is a door I cannot open. My magic is worn, my chants asleep.
I was born in a village, small and secretive like a womb. I never left it. I love the ocean not the shores.
The following are links to other Web sites with information about translator Khaled Mattawa and poet Adonis. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)
Khaled Mattawa is my favorite poet from arab world. He also is my facebook friend. His translation of Adonis’ poems is very good, which awarded by Griffin (Griffin Poetry Prize 2011), thanks all gazi saiful islam
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about 1 year ago
Khaled Mattawa is my favorite poet from arab world. He also is my facebook friend. His translation of Adonis’ poems is very good, which awarded by Griffin (Griffin Poetry Prize 2011), thanks all
gazi saiful islam