Time
Built from poems originally written in French, this collection lets time, memory, war, and love braid together in non-linear ways. Its structure expands from a single moment toward historical scale, placing everyday perception and philosophical thought in the same current.
Work Information
A single moment gradually opens into a larger field that holds history itself.
Time gathers a sequence of poems Etel Adnan wrote over more than a decade after receiving a postcard in Tunis. War and love, coffee and bombs, memory and the present are woven into one flow, making non-linear time itself the book's form.
Review Summaries
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Readers often praise the way the poems compress time while opening outward toward history, along with their strong forward motion. At the same time, some feel that the book's conceptual reach and fragmentation require patient reading.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Nightboat Books
- Published
- 2019-06-18
- Pages
- 144 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 1.27 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781643620046
- ISBN-10
- 1643620045
- Price
- 3050 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/Middle Eastern
WINNER of the INTERNATIONAL GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE WINNER of the BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD FINALIST for the 2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD On October 27, 2003, Adnan received a post card of a palm tree from the poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies in Tunisia, sparking a collection of poems that would unspool over the next decade in a continuous discovery of the present moment. Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958–1972. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959–1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet.” In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers―first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986) The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, she was awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors: l’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Many of her poems have been put to music by Tania Leon, Henry Treadgill, Gavin Bryars, Zad Moultaka, Annea Lockwood, and Bun Ching Lam. Her paintings have been widely exhibited, including Documenta 13, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The New Museum, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2014, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of her work.
Reviews
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Great literature. Ethel Adnan understood the Levant and the wider Middle East.