A Time Between Ashes And Roses

Adonis's poetry and prose writings have aroused much controversy in the Arab world, both for their provocative content and their arresting style. Grounded in traditional poetic styles, Adonis developed a new way of expressing modern sentiments. Although influenced by classical poets, Adonis started at a relatively early age to experiment with the prose poem, giving it density, tension, metaphors, and rhythm. He also broke with the diction and style of traditional poems, introducing a new and powerful syntax and new imagery. Through his innovative use of language, imagery, and narrative technique, Adonis has played a leading role in the revolutionizing of Arabic literature. He has garnered many of the world’s major poetry prizes. In A Time Between Ashes and Roses Adonis evokes the wisdom of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, liberally excerpting from and remolding its images; the modernism of William Carlos Williams; and the haunting urban imagery of poets such as Baudelaire, Cavafy, and Lorca. Three long poems allow him to explore profoundly the human condition, by examining language and love, race and favor, faith and dogma, war and ruin. In the lyrical “This Is My Name” and “Introduction to the History of the Petty Kings,” Adonis ponders Arab defeat and defeatism. In “A Grave for New York,” he reflects on the same theme by interrogating Vietnam-era America. This bilingual edition, presenting the poems in Arabic and English on facing pages, is enhanced by a critical bibliography of Adonis’s works, providing an accessible and crucial reference for scholars of modern and Middle Eastern poetry and culture. Shawkat M. Toorawa’s vivid and eloquent translation finally makes the poet’s signature work available to an English-speaking audience; the effect is no less powerful than were the first translations of Pablo Neruda into English.

As the main character lives an entire millennium, he witnesses firsthand various milestones of forgotten generations such as the Crusades, the Renaissance, and the devastating World Wars in an emotionally charged way that no textbook could ever describe. Savor the deepest hopes and fears of well-known individuals of ages past. Unveil the delicate humanity within history's heroes and villains, who are not much different than us. History is no longer a detached subject, but an intimate force like a grandparent's weary heart and unconditional love, with an inextinguishable promise of hope for the future. As the pages unfurl, you will learn things you may not even know about yourself. Discover the simplest but most profound secrets of life. Discover how your very existence was ultimately determined a thousand years ago, and how you, yourself have been carving the next millennium since the day you were born, engraving your own name in the essence of time itself. Ashes and Roses of a Millennium holds a legacy of love that will surely provoke a deep and intimate passion for history in the young and old alike.

What has happened since de Man and Derrida first read Austin? How has the encounter between deconstruction and the performative affected each of these terms? In addressing these questions, this book brings together scholars whose works have been provoked in different ways by the encounter of deconstruction and the performative. Following Derrida's appeal to any rigorous deconstruction to reckon with Austin's theorems and his ever growing commitment to rethink and rewrite the performative and its multiple articulations, it is now urgent that we reflect upon the effects of a theoretical event that has profoundly marked the contemporary scene. The contributors to this book suggest various ways of re-reading the heritage and future of both deconstruction and the performative after their encounter, bringing into focus both the constitutive aporia of the performative and the role it plays within the deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition.

Writing has come face-to-face with a most crucial juncture: to negotiate with the inescapable presence of violence. From the domains of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, this book stages a powerful conversation on questions of cruelty, evil, rage, vengeance, madness, and deception. Beyond the narrow judgment of violence as a purely tragic reality, these writers (in states of exile, prison, martyrdom, and war) come to wager with the more elusive, inspiring, and even ecstatic dimensions that rest at the heart of a visceral universe of imagination. Covering complex and controversial thematic discussions, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh forms an extreme record of voices, movements, and thought-experiments drawn from the inner circles of the Middle Eastern region. By exploring the most abrasive writings of this vast cultural front, the book reveals how such captivating outsider texts could potentially redefine our understanding of violence and its now-unstoppable relationship to a dangerous age.

"Frontispiece: Poem and calligraphy by Adonis, XXXX. Translated by Bassam Frangieh" --T.p. verso.

In this revealing new study, Tarik Sabry and Joe Khalil preside over an original new exploration of Arab culture. They employ subjects as varied as anthropology, media studies, philosophy, political economy and cultural studies to illuminate the relationship between culture, time and publics in an Arab context, whilst also laying the foundations for a much more nuanced picture of Arab society. The diverse themes and locations explored include communities at borders, in rural and urban locations, Syrian drama audiences, Egyptian, Saudi and Tunisian artists and activists and historical and contemporary Arab intellectuals. This fresh empirical research and interdisciplinary analysis illuminate intricate experiences that transcend local, national and religious boundaries and expose how Arab publics combine the media and technology to create a rich experience that shapes their collective imagination and social structure. Providing a grounded orientation to key debates on time and what can be defined as public in modern Arab cultures, Sabry and Khalil address teachers, students and those concerned about the delicate structures that underpin the upheavals of the modern Arab world.

An eclectic collection of poems about New York City. “New York, the city that never sleeps, contains more light than all the myriad heavens conceived of by its denizens of every possible race, religion, culture, color, and creed combined. All poets are besotted with light: it is the most transformative of all phenomena and we are permanently drunk on it—moon mad, sun blind, star struck.” — from the Foreword by Anne Pierson Wiese As Shawkat M. Toorawa writes in his preface, “Not every poet loves New York, but each and every one is mesmerized by it.” Indeed, with its protean mix of cultures, languages, natives, transplants, and exiles, New York City seems to exert a special hold over the poetic imagination. The sixty-one poems, extracts of poems, and song lyrics collected here reflect a wide range of responses to New York, both positive and negative, insider and outsider. Arranged in four sections—Morning, Day, Evening, and Night—the collection not only gives the reader the opportunity to experience twenty-four hours in New York through poetry, but also puts poems and poets in conversation, debate, and even occasionally in conflict with one another. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive, is volume juxtaposes well-known poets and lyricists such as Maya Angelou, Bob Dylan, Denise Levertov, and Walt Whitman with important and emerging voices such as Valzhyna Mort, Purvi Shah, and Melanie Rehak, as well as poets less frequently included in such anthologies, such as Mahmoud Darwish, Anna Margolin, and Nicanor Parra. The result is a collection of poems that vary in their aesthetics, tone, mood, and subject, and thereby reflect the vexed and manifold nature of their subject—New York, the city that never sleeps. “Shawkat Toorawa has selected a thrilling chorus of voices, familiar and new, formal and slangy, immigrant and native. A perfect companion for your day or night on the town.” — Robyn Creswell, poetry editor of The Paris Review “A strength of this collection is its rich mix of female and male poets, and its wide range of demographic, racial, linguistic, aesthetic, and other multicultural perspectives across a period of time ranging from the late nineteenth century to our own decade. The poems are as various and full of élan as the city itself.” — Lisa Russ Spaar, editor of All That Mighty Heart: London Poems “There are almost as many anthologies of New York poems as there are skyscrapers, but in terms of sheer reading pleasure The City That Never Sleeps towers over them all.” — Don Share, Editor, Poetry magazine

A bilingual anthology of poems from the sixth century to the present, Arabic Poems is a one-of-a-kind showcase of a fascinating literary tradition. The Arabic poetic legacy is as vast as it is deep, spanning a period of fifteen centuries in regions from Morocco to Iraq. Themes of love, nature, religion, and politics recur in works drawn from the pre-Islamic oral tradition through poems anticipating the recent Arab Spring. Editor Marlé Hammond has selected more than fifty poems reflecting desire and longing of various kinds: for the beloved, for the divine, for the homeland, and for change and renewal. Poets include the legendary pre-Islamic warrior ‘Antara, medieval Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydun, the mystical poet Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya, and the influential Egyptian Romantic Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi. Here too are literary giants of the past century: Khalil Jibran, author of the best-selling The Prophet; popular Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani; Palestinian feminist Fadwa Tuqan; Mahmoud Darwish, bard of occupation and exile; acclaimed iconoclast Adonis; and more. In their evocations of heroism, nostalgia, mysticism, grief, and passion, the poems gathered here transcend the limitations of time and place.