Lebanon: Poems of Love and War, Bilingual Edition (Middle East Literature In Translation) (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series) (English and French Edition)

This bilingual anthology, edited by Christophe Ippolito, contains Samuel Hazo's complete translation of Lebanon: Twenty Poems for One Love and Paul B. Kelley's selections from the never-before-translated Sentimental Archives of a War in Lebanon. The Francophone poet Nadia Tueni has devoted readers in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East and has quickly achieved poetic distinction in France. The fluency of her poetic language and motifs―reflecting Tueni's love of her people and country―is illuminated in Ippolito's introduction: "She chose to create a new poetic language that captured the fragile essence of her troubled country and exposed the many crises of identities present in the war. By identifying with her country, she placed herself beyond all parties and created a sacred river that irrigates her poems." Drawn from two collections that were published during the civil war in Lebanon in 1979 and 1982, these poems are haunted by the Lebanese war: some transcend famous Lebanese locales as the symbolic incarnations of the land's eternal essence; others, illuminated at first by nostalgic memories, take on a prophetic tone. Tueni's work merges the poetic with the political landscape of her country. She writes: " I belong to a country that commits suicide every day, while it is being assassinated." The languages of Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and surrealist poetry have had a decisive influence on Tueni's poetry. But she also owes a great debt on the Arabic side to the avant-garde poets, for example, the celebrated Adonis. Like many Lebanese writers, Tueni was active in political circles, particularly after the war in 1967. Her poems tell of suffering―"memories of an abandoned garden slip away"―of her own life slipping away, and in the end, the reader is invited to reflect on the mimesis of identity: identity of a country, identity of a woman, each echoing the other.

Lebanon: Poems of Love and War, Bilingual Edition (Middle East Literature In Translation)

Literature & Fiction

Tuéni, Nadia

Literary

Syracuse University Press

This book comprises both Christophe Ippolito and Paul B. Kelley's never-before translated Sentimental Archives of a War in Lebanon and Sam Hazo's English translation of Lebanon: Twenty Poems for One Love, both by Nadia Tueni. The languages of Rimbaud, Lautréamont and surrealist poetry have had a decisive influence on Tuéni's work. But she also owes a great debt on the Arabic side to the Lebanese avant-garde poets who, in turn, influenced by surrealism contributed to what has been called "a revolution of poetic language." Her work merges with the poetic and political landscape of her country. Like many Lebanese writers, Tuéni was active in political circles, particularly after the war in 1967. This book tells of the sufferingmemories of an abandoned garden fading awayand of a poet at the confluence of two cultures: Western and Middle Eastern.

Hazo, Samuel John

Ippolito, Christophe

Kelley, Paul B.

"Throughout her writing career, Tueni remained fiercely independent and unattached to fashionable schools of thought. Her fondness for her native land is intertwined with her need to reflect upon the realities and conditions that surrounded her. The operations at work in her poetry--from the varied linguistic play to the jarring juxtapositions, from the ambiguity of certain passages to the playful manipulations of syntax--are intensely original and delightfully strange. Scenes from her own childhood accompany imagery drawn from Christian mythology and rituals, while tales of lovers scorned are juxtaposed with those of gods abandoned. Revelatory descriptions of springs, mountains and street-scenes accompany metaphysical contemplations, themselves masked by layers of striking imagery. Forceful and meditative, two books that present internal and emotional landscapes as well as a sensual if fragmented portrait of her urban and natural surroundings." --Amir Parsa

The Blond Texts and The Age of Embers

Poetry

UpSet Press

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