The speaker of “Elegy for the Times”—a long prose poem by the Syrio-Lebanese poet Adonis, a master of Arabic verse—is not an “I” but a “we,” an anonymous collective that travels through a nightmarish landscape of tombstones, locusts, and sand. The journey is what the ancient Greeks called a catabasis, a descent from the interior to the coast, “the sea’s abyss.” Adonis’s “we” is a community in flight, but the end of the poem suggests that the sea may offer no escape, or that it may be the final, most harrowing obstacle.
The poem, which I translated for our Summer issue, is visionary in scope, yet attentive to haunting details: the light glinting off a helmet, the stains of sweat on a dancer’s loincloth. Beyond the controlled hysteria of its images, I was drawn to the poem because it seems to have leaped from today’s headlines, conjuring the civil war in Syria and the vast migrations it has provoked. The scale of this ongoing tragedy defies the imagination, yet Adonis’s elegy is one of those rare works that aligns with Seamus Heaney’s definition of poetry: “a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament.” (Heaney was thinking of Ireland’s own time of troubles.)
But Adonis’s poem actually has nothing to do with the predicament of present-day Syria—or at least, it wasn’t inspired by current events. “Elegy” was written more than fifty years ago, on a wholly different occasion.
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