Knox Hall, 207, Columbia University
on the campus of Union Theological Seminary on 122nd Street and Broadway
Muhammad Bennis, renowned Moroccan poet and scholar will deliver a talk on Arabic Modernist Poetics and the Classical Tradition from 4:10-6 p.m on Wed., Sept 27 at 207 Knox Hall. He will also read some of his poems.
Mohammed Bennis is a Moroccan poet who ranks among the most important voices in Arab literature. He was born in Fez, in 1948. He taught Arabic Modern Poetry in the Faculty of Arts at the Mohammed-V Agdal University in Rabat, from 1980 to 2016. He has published over 30 collections of verse, essays and translations in Arabic. Many of his poems have been translated and published into English, French, Italian, Japanese, German, Catalonian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Persian, Russian and Chinese.
In 1974, he founded “Al Thaqâfa Al Jadida” [The New Culture], which played an active role in the cultural life of Morocco until it was shut down by the Moroccan government in 1984. He was also the driving force behind the funding of The House of Poetry in Morocco in 1996, and became its president from 1996 to 2003. He was primarily responsible for the establishment in 2000 by UNESCO of an International day of Poetry, on March 21. He has translated texts from French into Arabic, namely the works of Bernard Noël, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Georges Batailles.
Among the prizes he has received are the Morocco Book award for Gift of the Void in 1993; the Le Prix Grand Atlas of translation (Rabat) for his poetry collection Between Two Funerals in 2000; the Calopezzati Prize of Mediterranean literature for the Italian translation of Gift of the Void (Dono Del Vuoto) in 2006; the International Feronia Prize for literature (Italy) in 2007; the Al Owais Award (Dubai) in 2008; the Maghreb Culture Prize (Tunisia) in 2010; Premio Letterario Internazionale Ceppo Pistoia in 2011 for Il Meditteraneo e la parola; and in 2014, France’s Max Jacob “Étranger” Prize. In France in 2002, he was awarded the rank of Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
He is also an honorary member of the World Haiku Association in Japan. In 2017, he has awarded the Medal of Culture, Creation and Art by the president of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas. About his poetry, the French poet Bernard Noël writes: “Next to Adonis and Mahmoud Darwich, Mohammed Bennis has built a work that owes only to the patient search of his own rightness to have become exemplary in the midst of the Arabic language. It already carries a future that makes it a founder.”
