[VIRTUAL] Ibn Hamdis: the Sicilian with Harvard Professor William Granara
A poetry evening with Dr. Wiliam Granara, Gordon Gray Professor of Arabic at Harvard University.
In this SQCC Poetry and Prose event Dr. William Granara will present one of 'Abd al-Jabbar Ibn Hamds' poems from his voluminous poetry collection (Diwan). The poem (qasid: ode), is untitled but catalogued as #110, and comprises thirty-seven lines. It is regarded as perhaps the best known of his Siqilliyat, that is, poems primarily dedicated to his beloved homeland of Sicily. The poem is divided into three parts: a brief gnomic introduction bemoaning the twists of fate and loss of youth, a recollection or fantasy of a care-free youth of pleasures in a paradisiacal Sicily, and finally the loss of both his youth and his homeland.
Dr. William Granara is Gordon Gray Professor of Arabic in the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he currently serves as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He is also founding director of Harvard's Summer School program, Postcolonial Encounters: France and the Arab World, in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Professor Granara specializes in the history and cultures of the Muslim Mediterranean. He writes on cross-cultural encounters between Islam and Christendom throughout the Middle Ages. He is author of Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, I.B. Tauris, was published in June 2019. His second monograph, Ibn Hamdis the Sicilian, was published by One World Press’s Makers of the Muslim World in 2021. He is also co-editor of The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art and Science, Brill (2019).
In addition, he writes on contemporary Arabic literature and has published translations of several Egyptian and North African novels. His more recent publications include: "Nostalgia, Arab Nationalism and the Andalusian Chronotope in the Evolution of the Modern Arabic Novel" (2005); "Nile Crossings: Hospitality and Revenge in Egyptian Rural Narratives" (2010), "The Historical Poetics of Jurji Zaidan’s Andalusian Fictional Cosmos" (2013), and "Contesting the Mediterranean in Colonial North African Literature" (2019).
Join us for an online Poetry and Prose event.
Location: Via Zoom
Date and Time: September 15, 2021, 6:00-7:00pm ET
Plan to Join? Yes! - You will receive a zoom link the day of the event.
