Adonis, Syrian poet: “The question is not to change the regime. It is changing society” | Culture | EUROtoday

Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Qasabin, 94 years previous), recognized by his pseudonym Adonis, firmly believes within the energy of poetry. Unlike politics, he maintains, it stays and induces fixed questions. “Any society must be based on freedoms and above all on the freedom of speech,” emphasizes the creator, thought of one of many pioneers of recent Arabic poetry. This is what he hopes for Syria, the place he fled on the age of 26 after spending a yr in jail. He developed his literary profession in Lebanon, however throughout the civil battle, he additionally left that nation in 1986. Since then he has lived in Paris, the place the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, offered him with the Joan Margarit International Poetry Prize this Wednesday.

“Poetry does not transform events nor does it change situations, but it creates a new consciousness, which allows the individual to see the world in a new, different way, and allows him to conceive other possibilities,” declared Adonis upon receiving the award on the Institute. Cervantes of the French capital. The jury, made up of the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero; the editor and author Javier Santiso; the Colombian author Héctor Abad Faciolince; the previous director of the National Library, Ana Santos; and Mònica Margarit, daughter of the poet Joan Margarit, determined to award him the prize “for a lyrical work of indisputable quality and for its cultural dialogue between civilizations, between East and West.” His writings, amongst which stand out Songs of Mihyar of Damascus (1961), Epitaph for New York (1971) or the three volumes of The Bookhave been translated into quite a few languages. This is the second version of the award, which American poet Sharon Olds obtained final yr.

Adonis’ work displays his dedication to human rights. The author, whose identify has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for years, has repeated on a number of events that he rejects any ideology. That is partly why he observes what’s at the moment taking place in Syria, the place an alliance of insurgent teams led by the Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) overthrew President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday, after greater than 20 years in energy. The insurgent coalition’s offensive started on November 27 in northwest Syria and concluded with the seize of Damascus, from the place the president fled. And, though the top of the regime provoked a wave of hope throughout the inhabitants, it additionally opens a interval of uncertainty after 14 years of battle.

Adonis insists that he’s not a politician and remembers that he left Syria in 1956. But he agrees to reply some questions concerning the state of affairs within the nation the place he was born. “I don’t regret at all what ended, that is, the regime that was there. I was always against it. But I don’t know what is going to replace it, what are they going to do?” he asks. “The issue is not to change the regime. It is changing society,” says the poet. After the Arab Spring, the wave of protests that shook Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria beginning in 2011, the creator obtained an avalanche of criticism for sustaining that that they had not been revolutions. The revolts, he argued on the time, solely overthrew the leaders, however with out altering the constructions of energy or society itself.

Today he wonders what’s going to occur in Syria. Will or not it’s a society based on rights and freedoms? Will faith be separated from politics? “Any society must be based on freedoms and above all on the freedom of speech,” he insists. “Let’s hope something along those lines happens in Syria. If not, we just go around. We advance theoretically, but we take steps backwards in practice,” he analyzed earlier than the supply ceremony.

Luis García Montero participated within the occasion; Victorio Redondo, ambassador of Spain in France; and Javier Santiso, founding father of the publishing home La Cama Sol, which is able to publish the speech that the Syrian poet gave when receiving the award, and can disseminate it each in Spain and overseas, with translations into Spanish, English and French. The award was offered by Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, who highlighted the position of the humanities in society. “We cannot do without poetry,” he mentioned. Culture, he added, “is like the air we breathe. We need it like we need air to breathe and to live.” The recognition is promoted by the Cervantes Institute, La Cama Sol and Margarit’s household (1938-2021) with the intention of publicizing the work of the Catalan creator, who had the Cervantes Prize and the Reina Sofía Prize for Poetry.

Adonis launched prose poetry and free verse into Arabic literature. He insists that what stays, in any case and greater than politics, is poetry. And he cites the instance of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a number one determine in Russian poetry originally of the twentieth century. “If we make a comparison between Lenin, who founded the Soviet State, and Mayakovsky, which of the two evokes us more today? It’s Mayakovsky. Because Lenin was linked to the State, to history, to ideology. But Mayakovsky changed the relationship between words and things. “This change will last forever,” he particulars. “What remains is poetry, not politics,” he provides.