Syrian poet Adonis WINS Goethe Germany prices

AMMAN  - poet Syrian Adonis, who defended democracy and secular thought in the Middle East, has been prestigious award of the prize Germany Goethe Wednesday.

"The most important of his generation and he considered the Arab poet Adonis selection Committee awards the prize for its cosmopolitan (work) and the contribution to international literature", the German Government said in a news release.

He said Adonis, which calls itself "the pagan poet" will receive the prize of € 50,000 ($70,320), which is awarded every three years, at a ceremony in Frankfurt, hometown of Goethe, August 28.

The announcement was made as an uprising against the autocratic regime, inspired by the revolutions which reversed the leaders of the Tunisia and the Egypt scan Syria homeland of Adonis, despite a campaign of repression which killed hundreds of civilians.

Adonis refrains from openly criticising the Syrian authorities during the uprising.

But he launched a scathing attack on three weeks on all the Arab leaders as "leaving behind nothing except breakdown, delay, retirement, bitterness and torture." They met in power. They do not build a society. They transform their country into a space of slogans without any cultural content or human. ?

He said that the uprising in Syria would be the test of whether the Arab revolution would succeed in the construction of the "civic life" which rises over religion.

Referring to fears that Arab uprisings can pave the way in Islamic leaders, he expressed skepticism that same "moderate Islam" would offer rights to non-Muslims.

Born in the village of Qassabin of the mountain overlooking the Mediterranean Sea as Ali Hamid Saeed Esber, 1930 Adonis was born of a long tradition of Arab poets who have acted as a force of modernity on a strict interpretation of religious texts.

But even supporters have difficulty tracking images, intense and complex verse which has made its mark.

He has little sympathy for the theories which seek to mould the Middle East in an Arab unique Islamic culture, marginalizing the ethnic minorities and the diversity of thought.

A so-called "revolutionary" literary, he broke with Arab poetry language and traditional, of the pre-Islamic era, espoused simple shapes to convey deep topics on philosophy, the love, culture and politics.

"I think that I am a wave, trip, since the time of Gilgamesh (a King Sumerian who reigned more than 4 000 years ago), to Beirut and the Arabs," he wrote in "the hand of poetry, open the book of the Horizon."

Adonis made his studies in a French grammar school before graduating from the University of Damascus in the 1950s and displacement in Beirut, the Arab cultural heart of the Middle East.

He left during the invasion of the Lebanon in 1982 and settled in France, but it still visit to Damascus.