Guest of the ilb 2004
Fuad Rifka was born in Syria in 1930 and moved to
Lebanon with his Christian parents in the 1940s. He studied
Philosophy in Beirut and obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from the
University of Tübingen in 1965 with a dissertation on the aesthetics of
Martin Heidegger. Since 1966 he has taught Philosophy at the
Lebanese American University Beirut. In addition, he has spent
numerous semesters as a visiting lecturer and scholar in the USA, Great
Britain, Italy and Germany. German philosophers still hold a
prominent place in his syllabus. His ardent interest in German
poets and thinkers came about accidentally more than forty years ago at
the Beirut Goethe Institute, when he discovered an English edition of
Rilke’s 'Duino Elegies'. This volume of poetry was to have such a
lasting influence on him that he developed the urgent wish "to
translate German poetry into Arabic, in order to make it known
throughout the Arab world". Rendering contemporary poetry into
Arabic has also been the declared aim of the group associated with the
avant-garde poetry magazine 'Shi’r', which Rifka co-founded with Yusuf
al-Khan, Adonis, and others in 1957. 'Shi’r' aimed at
nothing less than the liberation of classical Arabic poetry from its
subjection to strict rules of form and content, and the admission of
freer, more experimental poetry. The first volume of Rifka’s own
poetry was published in 1961, followed by further poems and essays, as
well as translations from German and English. In 1993, a
translation of the Bible was issued in which he had participated.
This translation resulted in a volume of 365 Bible stories for children
retold by Rifka. Throughout his lyrical work, Fuad Rifka
perpetually searches for the "absolute poem". He radically
abstains from ornamentation. In short, concise lines he conveys
both his love of nature and his sense of transitoriness. Using
language stripped to its essentials he attempts to penetrate the depths
of meaning beyond actual words. Or, as Rifka himself puts it: "In
all my poetry I have been writing on one single poem – to achieve
greater and greater clarity." In 2002, 'Das Tal der Rituale'
(Engl: The Valley of Rituals) was published, a dual language selection
of his poetry of the last fifteen years. In 2007, the German-Arabic
collection 'Die Reihe der Tage ein einziger Tag' (t: The sequence of
days one single day) followed.
For his Arabic translations of German poetry, including Goethe,
Hölderlin, Novalis, Rilke, and Trakl, Fuad Rifka was awarded the
Friedrich-Gundolf-Prize in 2001 by the German Academy for Language and
Poetry, which also selected him for membership one year later.
Fuad Rifka lives in Beirut.
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