Special Lecture: Poet Adonis on the Need for an Arab Revival
Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 2:00 p.m.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Brown Auditorium Theater
This program is open to the public and free with general museum admission. If you are not a museum member, please print this website article (by clicking on the printer icon at the lower right of this article or by clicking File > Print on the Menu Bar at the top of your screen) and bring it with you to receive complimentary museum admission. Seating for this program is limited.
This program is generously co-sponsored by the Arab American Educational Foundation.
This program is presented in Arabic and English. Simultaneous translation provided.
A reception and book signing follow the program. Adonis´s newly released English-language anthology, Adonis: Selected Poems, will be for sale in the MFAH Retail Store.
Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize, Adonis has been called "today´s most daring and provocative Arab poet," while his influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot´s on English-language verse, and to David Hume on Western philosophical thought.
Adonis has written extensively on the need to change the framework of both thinking and reasoning in the Arab world in order to stop the disintegration of Arab culture. In his own poetry—which is experimental in form and prophetic in tone—Adonis breaks with tradition to liberate his work from the chains of the "text".
In this rare Houston appearance, Adonis addresses the factors that hinder intellectual advancement in the Arab world, and why a new way of thinking is not an option, but an urgent necessity.
Adonis has written more than 20 books in his native Arabic, including the pioneering work An Introduction to Arab Poetics. Adonis received the Bjørnson 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. He lives in Paris.
Please print and bring this website article for free admission to the museum in order to enter the building where the lecture will take place.
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Syrian poet and literary critic, Adonis, or 'Ali Ahmad Sa'id, has studied and taught in several countries over the many and rich years of his literary career. His poetry and other writings have had a tremendous influence as an example of modernist Arabic writing. In his writings, the reader will find a combination of the spiritual, the political, and both the traditional and the modern.
His work, Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi (1961), has been termed a turning-point for Adonis and for modern Arabic poetry as a whole. Many view this work as his finest, although subsequent work is deemed richer and more experimental.