Adonis

Born in 1930 in the Alawite village of Qassabin in coastal Syria, Adonis took his pen name after the Phoenician deity, signalling from the start that his Arabic would draw as much on the pre-Islamic Mediterranean as on the Islamic east. He studied philosophy at Damascus, was imprisoned for political activity in the early 1950s, and crossed the border to Lebanon in 1956, where he co-founded the modernist journal Shi'r with Yusuf al-Khal — a publication that, with its short life and outsized influence, did for Arabic poetry what Poetry magazine did for English.

Adonis's poetry from Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi (Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, 1961) onward set out to dismantle the qasida — the inherited Arabic ode form, with its fixed meters and rhyme — and to reroute Arabic poetry through Surrealism, Heidegger, and the Sufi tradition of al-Niffari. The long sequence Mufrad bi-Sighat al-Jam' (A Singular in the Form of the Plural, 1977) and the multi-volume Al-Kitab (The Book, 1995–2003) are among the most ambitious Arabic poems of the century.

He is at least as important as a critic. His three-volume Al-Thabit wa-l-Mutahawwil (The Static and the Dynamic, 1974–78) reread the Arabic tradition as a war between an official, conservative current and a suppressed, heretical, dynamic one — and made figures like al-Niffari, al-Hallaj, and Abu Nuwas into the secret heroes of modern Arabic letters.

Adonis has lived in Paris since the 1980s and has been a perennial Nobel candidate. His public criticisms of religious authoritarianism in the Arab world — and his more controversial positions on the Syrian uprising — have made him a divisive figure inside Arab intellectual life, but the centrality of his work to any account of modern Arabic poetry is not seriously disputed.