That Adonis is widely acknowledged as the Arab world’s most renowned poet only made the absence of a major collection of his work in English all the more confounding. When I began the Margellos World Republic of Letters translation series at Yale, I named the poet’s work as the cornerstone of the project, which was conceived to address the disappointing fact that less than 3% of all books published in the USA are translations. About half that number accounts for works of literature in translation. When the US first invaded Iraq, a Turkish friend teaching in Paris called me and said, “OK hotshot, you consider yourself a man of letters, name me a dozen Arabic poets.” After my embarrassed silence, he said, “OK; I’ll make it easy on you. Name me five you’ve actually read.” I scanned my shelves and was chastened. “In translation, of course,” he further teased. I could only call up Gibran and Mahmoud Darwish.

The translation series I dreamed up was meant to reverse this quiet (even unintentional) censoring of foreign voices. Bolaño and Larsson notwithstanding, the economics of translation are tough. But it goes deeper, I think. Americans are used to exporting culture rather than importing it. The irony of the Pentagon scrambling to find government translators of Arabic and Farsi after 9/11 was paralleled by the lack of translations of some of the best writers of the cultures we were at war with. To quote Adonis himself, “the more you are in contact with the other, the more you unveil about yourself.”

A revered essayist, translator, historian, journalist, critic and storyteller, a writer chronically short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Adonis might conduct himself with all the austerity and distance his formidable reputation would allow. That is what made our first meeting in Paris three years ago all the more delightful. Adonis is a gracious host, a wonderful conversationalist and a warm, open soul ready to befriend his enthusiasts. Despite my faulty French and his better than admitted English, we feasted on good wine and conversation for many hours.

Adonis agreed that the illiteracy problem in the US should be addressed. He had been indifferent, he said, to an English translation, because he knew the work would be necessarily different than his own. That said, he was vigorously involved with the selection of the translator. We auditioned no fewer than four candidates and settled readily on Khaled Mattawa, who seemed a uniquely made to order translator: a native Arabic speaker who wrote his own award winning poetry in English!

Ali Ahmed Said Esber was born in a rural village in Syria in 1930. The oldest of six children, he worked the family farm; his interest in poetry was cultivated by his father who taught him to read and memorize poetry and verses in the Qu’ran, reciting them in the fields he worked. At fourteen, he composed a poem to recite to the visiting President of Syria who was so impressed with the teenager that he asked him what he most wished for. An education is what Adonis responded and he was awarded a fellowship to study at a French-run high school and then philosophy at Damascus University.

I asked Adonis about this fairy tale story and he laughed but also assured me that that is where the storybook life ends. By the age of 19, the young poet had already changed his name to Adonis, given to him by the leader of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party Antun Saaba, in order to evade the censorship he was being met with in the poetry magazines. When asked about the nom de plume, Adonis claims he meant the flower not the classical Greek god, waiting with a twinkle in his eye to see whether his conversant would catch the fact that in the myth, the wounded boy, Adonis, was turned into a flower. In 1956, after being imprisoned for a year for political activities he fled to Beirut which, at the time, was a vibrant and cosmopolitan center of arts, literature, publishing and café society in the Arab world. There, he co-founded and edited the influential and progressive journals, “Shi’r” and “Muwaqaf.” After enduring invasions and wars, he left the battered Lebanon in 1985 and has lived in Paris ever since.

Adonis: Selected Poems is the first comprehensive survey of Adonis’ first six decades of work, allowing English readers to reckon with the arc of a remarkable literary career. Steeped in the lyrical and Surrealist traditions of European poetry, his essays and poetry have exerted an influence on Arabic literature comparable in English only to that of T. S. Eliot if not Walt Whitman. In his seminal text, An Introduction to Arabic Poetics, Adonis writes of the need for a new way of reading Arabic classics that is not held captive by a “semi-organic relationship with the establishment and its religious and social values.” He argues that Arabic poetry, in fact, is “pluralistic, sometimes to the point of self-contradiction.”

Experimental in form and prophetic in tone, Adonis is credited by critics in the West with bringing modernism to the Arabic poetic tradition. He is quick to deny this though, claiming that modernity has always been a part of Arabic literature. His work, he might say, is thus trapped between dueling naïvetés: he is simultaneously credited and blamed for redeeming a venerable Arab literary tradition by introducing to it a (preexisting) modernity that would ultimately destroy it!

A champion of secular democracy, Adonis has been critical of organized and fundamental religion. He describes himself as “among those who seek the ills of the Arabs in their own history, not outside of it.” He believes that the vast majority of Arab societies is not teeming with violent resentment but actually living with great apathy, oppressed by an obscurantism, based on an archaic interpretation of life and religion. On the other hand, he believes that the West is guilty of conflating the marginalism of Arabic politics with its culture and art, enforcing yet further ignorance of the riches therein.

Adonis came to NYC to celebrate his turning 80 years old with a reading at the 92nd Street YMCA last October. This was just a few days after the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Mario Vargas Llosa. Adonis had been named in the global media as an odds-winning favorite; in person he professes a vast indifference to the whole affair. He is irritated by the Press that begins every interview by asking him if he feels snubbed. I don’t mind. There’s still time and I just sent off a carton of the books to the Swedish Academy.

At heart, Adonis’ poems have great heart. He believes in the artistic, poetic soul within every human being. His poems ring with that generosity and I’ll end by quoting a short verse that I take out from time to time:

Live and be radiant
Write a poem
And go away
Increase
The expanse of the earth.

John Donatich is the Director of Yale University Press.