Concerto al-Quds

In this stunning volume about Jerusalem (al-Quds in Arabic), Syrian poet Adonis, who has been hailed as a founding voice in Arabic-language modernism, envisions the poem as a space for dialogue between traditions, nations, and historical milieux. Mattawa’s careful English rendering preserves the integrity of Adonis’s cosmopolitan influences, paying homage to the book’s various inspirations. The voice of these poems bisects time and geography, revealing the convergences contained within each “flower,” each “accusation,” even the “nets that encircle” one’s own steps. History is revealed as recursive, elliptical. “Time was busy filming the battle, turning it into a documentary,” Adonis writes. The poems’ documentarian approach records this battle—this collision of worldviews, aesthetics, and implicit assumptions about language, self, and reason. He invites readers to share the experience of encountering the other, see their selves as other, and recognize the transformations to which this awareness might give rise—re-imagining themselves, to carving space within the psyche for multiple ways of ordering the world, explaining its “dust,” its “angels,” and the missiles that “only target lovers homes.” (Dec.)