Songs of Mihyar the Damascene

Adonis is not an easy poet to read. He was influenced by virtually everything, from the French Post/structuralist school, to German philosophy (I am thinking of Nietzsche in particular) to medieval , pre/post-islamic literary texts and philosophies (He had claimed that he had read all ancient Arab texts ... so kudos for him. I doubt that was an empty boast). He was also influenced by surrealism, sufism... well you catch my drift.Mihyar the Damascene is probably one of his more famous books, if not the most. I am happy with this translation (I've read an old translation where my objection to it started with the Title translated as "Mihyar of Damascus".)Critics had linked the environment and settings in this book to Eliot's "Wasteland" which is accurate enough... but do not confuse Adonis with Eliot... this is a man who has set himself not to preserve history, not to think about the relevance of the past in the present... this is a man who wants to obliterate history from the present... or at least to change it in such a way that it is the present and the future that are the vital agents that would act to revivify his "wasteland" and not an antiquated, regressive past -- a past replete with the theoocentric surety of bygone days where belief was closer to the fountainhead.The speaker in the poem, Mihyar is a prophet-like figure... but he does not come to build his own faith but to destroy fallacies, faiths and beliefs. He does not come to return the people to the true and narrow path. He is "the water that won't return to its source." He does not root humanity in any paradise or God but rather he tries to root it in "its own footsteps" to reformulate one of his verses.Mihyar is a knight of "strange words" creating an Arab language whose very essence is alien because it is new and does not follow the old poetic forms... his is a language "rippling among the masts".Mihyar deos not create himself as an "other" ... this idea is vaguely poststructuralist... rather he creates himself of himself and "he comes to a land where he sees nothing but himself".As such, the poem "The Wound" which is probably among the more famous poems of the books, insinuates the intent of Mihyar (I say insinuate because Adonis rarely baldly says what he means... ah the curse of being a surrealist, sufi secular poet). The wound is that which wounds history: "I am the wound that grows in your narrow history".. which grows and doesn't leave a trace (i.e. a trace of the "other" if you like... the "other" would perhaps mean the superstitions and outdated beliefs that Adonis thinks are inundated in his culture).In a land riddled with religious jurists and figures who control the people by proclaiming them sinners, Mihyar comes to liberate them and to give the the option to live in "The joy of becoming sins... and a sinner without sin".Ultimately Mihyar's creed is refusal ... the refusal of traditions... his is "the path of fire... the hell of refusal"... he is who "sow[s] sedition" and "gives words their reproductive organs". He does not follow but "precedes the path". He is "he whose path has yet to begin". He does not enter time to be controlled by it... rather his "blood is the womb for time"He is a prophet of nothing and as such... he is the beginning but not the end of the change he wants to see in his wasteland.