Tombeau of Ibn Arabi and White Traverses - Softcover

Abdelwahab Meddeb

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823231151 ISBN 13: 9780823231157

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Abdelwahab Meddeb crosses boundaries in unusual and important ways. Born in Tunis, he is now a French national. In his academic and literary work, he is concerned with the roots and history of Islam and with crossings, like his own, between Islam and Europe. He is an author of extraordinarily beautiful French; this is the first book to represent this lyrical aspect of his work in English translation.
White Traverses is a poetic memoir about growing up in Tunisia and the contrasts between Islamic and European influences. In it, the intense colors and blinding whites of the Maghreb interweave with the rich traditions of French poetic discourse. In Africa as in Europe, white designates purity. Yet the complex Mediterranean streams of culture that flow together in Tunis problematize this myth. Meddeb captures their white refractions in vignettes that teach us the truth of the coincidence of contraries, of how the impure lodges in the pure.

Tombeau of Ibn Arabi is a series of prose poems that draw their inspiration from the great Sufi poet of mediaeval Andalusia, Ibn Arabi, whose fervent love poetry both scandalized and transformed Islamic culture, and from Dante, who learned from Ibn Arabi a poetry of sensual love as initiation into spiritual experience. It seeks to show how a text written in the present day can maintain a link with the great dead . Ibn Arabi and Dante are two symbolic figures confirming the author's twofold spiritual genealogy--Arabic and European.

About this title

About the Author:

Abdelwahab Meddeb (1946-2014) was novelist and poet who taught comparative literature at the Université Paris X (Nanterre). Meddeb published more than twenty books in French. His La maladie de l’islam, winner of the Prix François Mauriac, has been translated into English as The Malady of Islam.

Review:

Abdelwahab Meddeb is doubtlessly the major Tunisian writer of his generation. This book presents cutting-edge writing that stands out as among the most innovative contemporary work-not only North African, but world-wide-in its genre-breaking narrative investigations via autobiography, poetry, cultural analysis, Sufi meditation, literary reflection & travel writing. Meddeb is a major scholar of Arab culture and a specialist of Ibn Arabi'an Sufism, two areas of knowledge and experience that underlie and buttress the Tomb of Ibn Arabi sequence of texts. The 'alloglot imagination' of White Traverses plays superbly between his writing language (French) and his cultural language (Arabic), as it explores the color (and the word) white in his Maghrebian cultural space and beyond. The color and the space turn out to be a profoundly anti-Mallarmean 'whiteness,' i.e., a color/space that is never silent but a marvelously voluble process of cascading propositions - a montage of images of 'white' peopled (i.e. in-formed) by a myriad constellations. This is breathtaking writing that has been brought over into English with great care, clarity and felicity by Charlotte Mandell, one of our greatest translators from French at work today. (―Pierre Joris University at Albany, State University of New York)

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0823231151
• ISBN 13: 9780823231157
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 116