Jump to content

Elia Abu Madi

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Elia Abu Madi
Born
إيليا أبو ماضي
(Īlyā Abū Māḍī )

(1890-05-15)May 15, 1890
Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Syria
Died November 23, 1957(1957-11-23) (aged 67)
New York, United States
Occupations
  • Poet
  • journalist
  • publisher
Relatives[1]
Writing career
Genrepoetry
Movements
Mahjar (The Pen League), New York City

Elia Abu Madi (also known as Elia D. Madey; Arabic: إيليا أبو ماضي Īlyā Abū Māḍī [note 1]) (May 15, 1890 – November 23, 1957) was a Lebanese-born American poet.

Early life

[edit]

Abu Madi was born in the village of Al-Muhaydithah, now part of Bikfaya, Lebanon, on May 15, 1890, to a Greek Orthodox Christian family. At the age of 11 he moved to (Alexandria, Egypt) where he worked with his uncle.

Career and works

[edit]

In 1911, Elia Abu Madi published his first collection of poems, Tazkar al-Madi. Shortly after, he was exiled by the Ottoman authorities[2] and he left Egypt for the United States, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1916, he moved to New York City and began a career in journalism. In New York, Abu Madi met and worked with a number of Arab-American poets including Gibran Khalil Gibran. He married the daughter of Najeeb Diab, editor of the Arabic-language magazine Meraat-ul-Gharb, and became its chief editor in 1918. His second poetry collection, Diwan Iliya Abu Madi, was published in New York in 1919; his third and most important collection, Al-Jadawil ("The Streams"), appeared in 1927. His other books were Al-Khama'il ("The Thickets")[3] (1940) and Tibr wa Turab (posthumous, 1960).

In 1929, Abu Madi founded his own periodical, As-Samir, in Brooklyn. It began as a monthly but after a few years it was published five times a week.

His poems are very well known among Arabs; poet, author, and journalist Gregory Orfalea wrote that "his poetry is as commonplace and memorized in the Arab world as that of Robert Frost is in ours."[note 2]

See also

[edit]

Notes

[edit]
  1. ↑ Lebanese Arabic Transliteration: Īlya Abu Māḍi, pronounced [ˈʔiːlja (ʔa)buˈmɑːdi].
  2. ↑ In A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City, ed. Kathleen Benson, Syracuse University Press, 2002, page 62.

References

[edit]
  1. ↑ Marmorstein, Emile (October 1964). "Rāshid Husain: Portrait of an Angry Young Arab". Middle Eastern Studies. 1 (1): 3–20. doi:10.1080/00263206408700002.
  2. ↑ Orfalea, Gregory (2002). Benson, Kathleen; Kayal, Philip (eds.). My Mother's Zither. New York: Syracuse University Press. p. 63. ISBN 0815607393.
  3. ↑ Ahmad, Imtyaz. "Abu Madi: A Voice of Modernity in Contemporary Arabic Poetry" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on August 15, 2016. Retrieved July 30, 2016.

Sources

[edit]
  • Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, Brill, 1977.
  • Encyclopedia of Islam, Brill, 1980.
  • The New Anthology of American Poetry, eds. Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, Thomas J. Travisano, Rutgers University Press, 2005.
  • Orfalea, Gregory; Elmusa, Sharif, eds. (1999). Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry. New York: Interlink. pp. 65–82. ISBN 1566563380.
  • Poeti arabi a New York. Il circolo di Gibran, introduzione e traduzione di F. Medici, prefazione di A. Salem, Palomar, Bari 2009. ISBN 88-7600-340-1. ISBN 978-88-7600-340-0.

Scholarly criticism

[edit]
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elia_Abu_Madi&oldid=1371707629"