Guadalajara, Jal., The renowned Syrian poet Adonis said this Friday that the creations of cultures and civilizations exhibited in the National Museum of Anthropology are more important than what is produced in modernity.

The constant candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature will give this Saturday at the Guadalajara International Book Fair the magisterial conference Poetry in the Arab world: between the fixed and the changeable. On Sunday, the last day of the meeting, he will chat there with the poet and translator Jeannette L. Clariond.

The 92-year-old essayist stated in a meeting with the press that a farmer who works on his land is smarter than the most advanced war technology.

Said the difference lies in how we look at the world and at the human being. To me, all those technologies invented today, the military planes that bomb entire towns and kill children, that’s not intelligence..

He pondered that the human being was born with nature, with the clouds, the fields and the mountains. If he loses that relationship, he loses himself. The deep conflict that humanity lives today is there.

Adonis recalled that “the essential themes existed from the beginning of time: love, death, friendship, existence and life. These main issues were already in Gilgamesh. If we go back to the poems about love written by the pharaonic women, those of Babelia and those of ancient Mesopotamia, those written today are less important by comparison.

He was emphatic in his support for the fight for women’s liberation in Iran, where massive demonstrations are now taking place with that objective, but he asked to understand the cultural context, since “the situation of women in the three monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Of course, Islam is the same. The woman is secondary, is a subordination.

We must demand the liberation of women from those religious chains in all three religions. We have to remember the tyranny that suffers all over the world. When it comes to condemning the suffering in Iran, we must look at the suffering of women in Palestine, in the United States or in China.

Adonis expressed that at his age he has already abandoned personal desires, instead he only hopes that new relationships are created on the horizon of this meeting that unites us today: wishes for freedom, culture and democracy for all peoples and for all nationalities.

how to understand poetry

Regarding the way of understanding poetry, the author of Adonijah (Broken Glass) explained that the “poem is the only place where I feel absolute freedom and where I am master of myself and my will. I want to pass that sentiment on to the reader.

Poetry is the air of this world, the sun of this existence. Through him we renew ourselves and see the world in new images in the same way that we see ourselves in love, renewing ourselves.

He added that the genre in which he has written for decades is that infinity open to everything, and teaches us that we do not inherit our identity as the property of our fields and farms. Poetry is that identity open to change, transformation and the creation of the human being..

Regarding his perception of time, he said that unlike time counted mathematically, in creation it is totally different. When we read Homer’s poetic world, we feel that he continues to live among us. Enheduanna wrote the first known love poem by a woman. If we read her today, we feel that she still lives among us. Time is part of poetry.

He extended the reflection with the example of the dictator Franco and the poet Federico García Lorca. The former ruled for a long time in Spain, but today, who lives among us, Lorca or Franco?

Regarding the highest award for world letters, the essayist said: Awards in general are a more social than artistic construction. The best that a poet can have is a poem. You should not think about anything other than how to create the poem in order to describe this world. Awards are part of the culture, but they have nothing to do with poetry.

To conclude, he referred to the meaning of three concepts in his work: death, silence and oblivion. He recited a line from a poem: Death itself only takes place in the lap of life. In that sense there is no death. It is part of life.

Forgetting, if you really want to be a creator and want to write, you have to forget everything. The memory repeats. That’s why you have to forget. Silence is a rebellion against any answer. The human being is a question, and if he forgets the question, he forgets himself.