Adonis: The Syrian Poet Who Finds Home in Exile
He is celebrated as a great Syrian poet, and like many of his compatriots, he lives in exile. Paris has become his distant city, a place far from war, yet its wounds touch his heart deeply. Adonis is now 93 years old. His real name is Ali Ahmed Said Esber. He began writing lines for Syrian newspapers as a teenager, until one paper published the very poems he had written up to that moment. Hidden under the pseudonym Adonis, the name appeared on the front page of a newspaper, drawing readers and editors close. They wanted to meet the young writer, to see more of his work. He appeared, astonished everyone with his quiet wit, and from that day he remained known by that pen name.
In a printed poetry collection titled Adonia, presented recently at the Guadalajara Mexico International Book Fair, where Arab world culture was highlighted, its interpreters Trino Cruz and his grandson Jaafar Al Aluni describe Adonis as the figure most associated with the name. They suggest he is a possible Nobel Prize candidate, noting that the name was chosen because it is a nickname that is neither entirely Arab nor Muslim, yet it is rooted in the ancient myths of the Eastern Mediterranean. Since he was born as Adonis, the name is said to symbolize a third birth, a moment of breaking and opening to the world.
The book, which received broad attention at the largest literary festival of the Spanish-speaking world, is published by Vaso Roto. The forewords and translations are the result of thoughtful, intelligent research that Adonis began as an anonymous teenager and later under the enduring pseudonym that has evolved beyond a mere name. Cruz and Al Aluni explain that the anthology plays an integrative and illuminating role within his body of work. It captures and synthesizes a powerful writing that can alter perspectives and revitalize life, dissolving obstacles to history, memory, existence, and identity.
Within the Vaso Roto anthology, the work is described as a journey into the core of history, a portrait of both poet and man in a contemporary world that has become a relentless and unlimited market. The editors note that Adonis’s poems, including those in the collection, take readers deep into exile and reveal how, in a perverse twist, our nature can emerge as the main source of freedom.
Disguised as a refined French gentleman with a distinctly Syrian demeanor, and appearing as a civilian monk, Adonis moved through the Guadalajara fair with the ease of a passer-by yet the piercing melancholy of someone who has witnessed storms. He wandered through a city that felt like a theater of contemporary madness, a place of street markets and memory. The scar mentioned in his poetry is not on a warm face but on the story behind his smile. He works as a translator and runs a magazine, while his grandson Al Aluni lives in Madrid and helps run Banipal, a magazine devoted to modern Arabic literature founded a couple of years ago through the efforts of Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon and British publisher Margaret Obank.
In response to a question from his grandson about what living with Adonis is like, he described an ambiguous scent that could be the aroma of mythology and childhood: light, air, water, herbs, and flowers—the scent of Syria and the long years of labor that have shaped his life.
In Mexico, among his fans who gathered to listen, the encounter was seen as a long, ongoing conversation about freedom, concerns for Arab issues, travel, death, cities, identity, and exile. Al Aluni visited the Mexican Museum of Anthropology, which he directed with his grandfather and colleagues, including the late Octavio Sun. The moment was marked by tears, as if witnessing a liminal imagery of a life joining past and present. The pair recalled their shared memories of friends and the communities they formed across continents.
Al Aluni later spoke of Adonis’s current mood following the loss of friends. He noted new, profound wounds opening between rooms and corridors, as Adonis reads heaven and earth in one book. From drawings, sculptures, masks, and murals, languages arise that challenge their own histories and travel across the world.
At one point the grandson asked his grandfather a question about the meaning of travel after exhausting the suns, their darkness, and their light. Adonis’s reply was that travel is merely an invitation to explore outer space and inner space, to affirm the self—the individuality that Islam and other monotheistic faiths have sometimes obscured. To truly see the visible, one must learn to see the invisible.
The grandson also asked about limits—what a city is, where its borders lie, who you are, and what your identity means. Adonis answered that travel reveals vast unknown spaces within the self. The more deeply one explores them, the more one discovers about the unknown. Our lives shift; wherever we go, we understand exile more clearly. Exile, Adonis said, is not just a matter of space or politics. It is the existential loneliness that accompanies every creator, a vast void between what one wants to express and what one can truly express. Political exile may seem simple by comparison; it is the deeper existential exile that haunts every artist as life unfolds.
In front of a full auditorium and a panel of journalists, Adonis spoke with the same philosophical ease. This is a condensed account of the Syrian poet’s questions and answers. The lingering question asked by the journalists was: What keeps moving your days forward?
R: Thank you for the honest inquiry. Time is the space where desires live. Now, at this age, he no longer pursues personal desires but hopes for new relationships built on the horizon: freedom, culture, and democracy for all people and nations. He expresses a wish for intercultural collaboration and creation, while keeping private hopes to himself.
Q: Do you think the public is fixated on a single truth?
R: Too often readers take his verses out of context, which makes explanations difficult later. He clarifies that his critique targets the city and its inhabitants, for cities are built and simultaneously disrupt human ties with nature. Humanity’s deepest conflict today lies in the relationship between people and the natural world. Though he comes from the city himself, he has always preferred the countryside for its quiet truths.
Q: What about the oppression of women in Iran?
R: This must be understood within its own context. Across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the status of women has often been secondary. This should be accounted for when discussing Iran, while also acknowledging male tyranny in societies everywhere. The suffering in Palestine, the United States, and China all reflect how the subjugation of women relates to broader social structures. Poetry remains his sanctuary where he feels free and in control of his will.
Q: After more than seven decades of writing, how would you describe poetry today?
R: Poetry is vital. It is the realm where freedom feels tangible, where the author can shape meaning and invite readers into that sense of freedom. Poetry is the air of the world, the sun of existence. It renews us and helps us see ourselves anew.
Q: How has the poetic journey evolved after writing his autobiography?
R: Poetic experience always opens horizons of life and thought. Poetry guides human identity toward the horizon, inviting change and transformation. It is a doorway to everything, an invitation to explore and adapt.
Q: How do myths and traditions transform through poetry?
R: Time may measure seconds and minutes, yet in creative moments time takes on another form. Reading Homer in school is a historical exercise, but his poetic world lives now, present and resonant. Poetry, in turn, has no fixed time. Time becomes part of the poem itself. The central themes endure—love, death, existence. If one compares ancient Mesopotamian poems with contemporary ones, the older voices often feel more consequential. The question today is how the world and its people were viewed then versus now. Technologies like airplanes and bombings do not signal true intelligence; the farmer in the field often embodies wiser, more humane intelligence than modern devices. The artifacts housed in Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology are for him more significant than many modern productions.
He believes a person can spark change. In that sense, hope always remains alive in humanity, and the path to eternity widens in the future.
Adonis speaks as a poet who enters the conversation by sounding the void and building verses from what exists in the universe. He insists that a poet cannot speak about the future without honoring the past, because the past leaves a legacy that informs the present, even through adversity. The example remains his own life and the enduring influence of figures like Lorca, who continue to live in memory and influence the poets who follow.