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Presentation of the “Book of Love” by Mohámmed Bennís
December 12, 20177:30 p.m.
CóRDOBA
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Samuel de los Santos Gener, 9).
7:30 p.m.
Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.
In Arabic, with consecutive translation.
Casa Árabe’s headquarters in Cordoba is hosting a day of literature with this Moroccan poet.
Moroccan poet Mohámmed Bennís is undoubtedly a notable representative of today’s living Arabic poetry, radically contemporary, with a structure that tirelessly seeks out the root of the poetic word: each book he has published is a new catalogue of experimental poetry, a menu of meditated, always open-ended explorations.
At this encounter, Bennís first proposes a reflection on The Book of Love, a work which “brings back” the writing in the Necklace through arduous, risk-taking poetic work. In his poems, he describes or transcribes several paragraphs from The Dove’s Necklace in a fine-tuned selection of the forms of love, profiles of desire taken down by Ibn Hazm, mixing and juxtaposing them with his own verses, which call for erotic freedom, carnal passion which, because of the intricate labyrinth of senses, emotion and feeling, always seeks another similar passion; they cry out for naked bodies which mutually flood each other to be rescued from nothingness, to wrest themselves from the clutches of death.
Secondly, he will be deciphering his most recent publication in Arabic for us: an anthology of poets from Al-Andalus which he has prepared along with an introductory study, titled Al-Andalus of Poets.
Mohámmed Bennís (Fez, 1948) is one of the finest modern-day poets in the Arabic language. Since the late sixties and until today, he has published more than fourteen books of poems, some of the most notable of which include Before the Word (1969), Towards Your Vertical Voice (1980), The Gift of the Void (1992), and this work, The Book of Love (1995). He has also authored eight volumes of essays, studies and critical texts, including The Writing of Effacement (1994), Trances for the Midday (1996), The Truth of Poetry (2007) and Speech of the Body (2010), in addition to a monumental, very personal study in four tomes of Arabic poetry since the late nineteenth century: Modern Arabic Poetry: Structures and transformations (Casablanca, 1989-1991). A professor of contemporary Arabic literature since 1980 at the University of Rabat’s School of Letters and Humanities, he currently teaches classes every Friday as a professor emeritus in two PhD courses on this subject matter. In addition other awards, he has been given the Moroccan Book Prize of 1993, the Atlas Prize of 2000 (granted by the cultural services of the French Embassy in Rabat) and the International Piero Bigongiari Award of 2011, which was given to him in Florence for his entire body of work in poetry and prose. He has translated several works by Mallarmé, Bataille and Bernard Noël from French into Arabic.
At this encounter, Bennís first proposes a reflection on The Book of Love, a work which “brings back” the writing in the Necklace through arduous, risk-taking poetic work. In his poems, he describes or transcribes several paragraphs from The Dove’s Necklace in a fine-tuned selection of the forms of love, profiles of desire taken down by Ibn Hazm, mixing and juxtaposing them with his own verses, which call for erotic freedom, carnal passion which, because of the intricate labyrinth of senses, emotion and feeling, always seeks another similar passion; they cry out for naked bodies which mutually flood each other to be rescued from nothingness, to wrest themselves from the clutches of death.
Secondly, he will be deciphering his most recent publication in Arabic for us: an anthology of poets from Al-Andalus which he has prepared along with an introductory study, titled Al-Andalus of Poets.
Mohámmed Bennís (Fez, 1948) is one of the finest modern-day poets in the Arabic language. Since the late sixties and until today, he has published more than fourteen books of poems, some of the most notable of which include Before the Word (1969), Towards Your Vertical Voice (1980), The Gift of the Void (1992), and this work, The Book of Love (1995). He has also authored eight volumes of essays, studies and critical texts, including The Writing of Effacement (1994), Trances for the Midday (1996), The Truth of Poetry (2007) and Speech of the Body (2010), in addition to a monumental, very personal study in four tomes of Arabic poetry since the late nineteenth century: Modern Arabic Poetry: Structures and transformations (Casablanca, 1989-1991). A professor of contemporary Arabic literature since 1980 at the University of Rabat’s School of Letters and Humanities, he currently teaches classes every Friday as a professor emeritus in two PhD courses on this subject matter. In addition other awards, he has been given the Moroccan Book Prize of 1993, the Atlas Prize of 2000 (granted by the cultural services of the French Embassy in Rabat) and the International Piero Bigongiari Award of 2011, which was given to him in Florence for his entire body of work in poetry and prose. He has translated several works by Mallarmé, Bataille and Bernard Noël from French into Arabic.
