Welcome to the beginning of a website that stems from my work as a poet and as a teacher at DePauw University.   As a challenge to myself, I began teaching courses in world poetry to learn more about poetry in languages other than English and in poetry in English from cultures outside the United States.   As an early goal, I wanted to make sure we weren’t just reading translations, but actually seeing and experiencing the original languages and cultures from which the poems we were reading came.  I often invited colleagues whose first language was not English to come and share the poems they loved from their original language.  That led to Chinese, Arabic, French, Polish, Russian, Vietnamese coming in actual person into my classroom.   My colleague, Emeritus Professor Nafhat Nasr, introduced me to the poet Adonis (pronounced A-dOn-ees), the great Syrian born poet.  He also brought the beauty of the Arabic language into my class.

Recently, I realized that the web could bring other languages and other poets into my classroom.  But I’m picky about what a good and useful introduction to a poet in a language other than English might be.  In this blog  I want to include video and audio footage where we can see a poem in its original language, hear that poem in its original language, and see a successful English translation.  At some point I’ll  post a blog to offer my understanding of “successful translation,” but let’s leave that behind for a moment.

While, I can’t provide a text of the Arabic here, as a thank you to Nafhat for being one of the first people to show me the wonders of poetry read in Arabic, what follows is a video of the Poet Adonis reading his poem “Love”:

http://vimeo.com/album/2441635/video/69364026

LOVE
The road and the house love me,
the living and the dead,
and a red clay jug at home
loved by water.
The neighbor loves me,
the field, threshing floor, and fire.
Toiling arms that better
the world, love me,
and go unrewarded with joy.
And tatters of my brother scattered about,
torn from his wilted chest
hidden by wheat spikes and season,
a carnelian from which blood shies.
He was the god of love as long as I lived.
What will love do if I too am gone?

from Adonis: Selected Poems translated by Khaled Mattawa
Yale University Press (2010)

If you like the video above click here to watch:
19 poems filmed by John Albert Jansen for
LAND OF ABSENCE, a film about the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis