{"id":2832,"date":"2010-01-07T06:21:32","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T11:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=2832"},"modified":"2010-01-07T06:21:32","modified_gmt":"2010-01-07T11:21:32","slug":"abdellatif-laabi-wins-2009-goncourt-poetry-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/abdellatif-laabi-wins-2009-goncourt-poetry-prize\/","title":{"rendered":"Abdellatif La\u00e2bi Wins 2009 Goncourt Poetry Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In early December, the yearly “Prix Goncourt” for poetry given by the members of the Goncourt Academy<\/strong> to a francophone poet was awarded to the Moroccan poet Abdellatif La\u00e2bi <\/strong>\u2014 which is excellent news, as La\u00e2bi is no doubt the major francophone Moroccan poet at work today.\u00a0 Check out his site here<\/a>, and the site of Souffles<\/strong>, the major Maghrebian\u00a0 literary, cultural & political avant-garde magazine of the late sixties \u2014 editing which led to 8 years of jail for La\u00e2bi \u2014 here<\/a>. Abdellatif La\u00e2bi was awarded this literary honor for “his life achievements,” the Academy said in a statement.\u00a0 The prize will be awarded on January 12, 2010, chez Drouant in Paris (a funky upscale restaurant, its site incongruously plays Alpha singing “elvis” if you wanna check out its menu…)<\/p>\n

I have often mentioned him on this blog, but if in a hurry, just check out this post<\/a> from 2006 on the occasion of the publication of the first volume of his Collected Poems<\/em>, and which includes a poem by AL and a small essay by me. I must confess that I hadn’t heard of this prize until Jerry Rothenberg brought it to my attention earlier today \u2014 but that’s not overly surprising, as my reading of the French literary press is rather casual these days, and the French are even more casual when it comes to poetry: the Goncourt website does not even mention this year’s winner of the poetry prize yet, so centered are they on each year’s novel prize.<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, it is excellent news indeed. Among my favorite books of 2009<\/a>, under the translation rubric, I did include the latest book by La\u00e2bi out here in the US:\u00a0<\/strong> Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis<\/em>, translated by Nancy Hadfield and Gordon Hadfield. Leafe Press. Here’s the blurb I wrote for that book:<\/p>\n

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Abdellatif La\u00e2bi, without a doubt the major francophone voice in Morocco today, writes with a quiet, unassuming elegance that holds and hides the violence any act of creation proposes. This is doubly true in his retelling of this story of a Forgotten Creation<\/em> \u2014 is it a fragmentary story or the full story of a fragmentary creation?\u00a0 But then every creation is a breaking apart, a making of fragments \u2014 making is<\/em> breaking \u2014 something La\u00e2bi states ab initio<\/em>: \u201cIn the beginning was the cry \/ and already discord.\u201d And the poem follows the movements of this cry, tracing its starts and stops, circling its essential enigma, descrying all the false mysteries and hopes and fantasies it gives rise to, despite itself. Creating itself, the poem learns that \u201cwhere nothing is born \/ nothing changes,\u201d and that eternity is but \u201can impenetrable jar \/ no magic will open.\u201d But the poem will get us there, I mean here, inside this act of imaginative creation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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