Description: Abdelwahab Meddeb crosses boundaries in unusual and important ways. Born in Tunis, he is now a French national. In his academic and literary work, he is concerned with the roots and history of Islam and withcrossings, like his own, between Islam and Europe. He is an author of extraordinarily beautiful French; this is the first book to represent this lyrical aspect of his work in English translation.White Traverses is a poetic memoir of growing up in Tunisia, and the contrasts between Islamic and European influences. The intense colors and blinding whites of the Maghreb interweave with the rich traditions ofFrench poetic discourse. Tombeau of Ibn Arabi is a series of prose poems that draw their inspiration from the great Sufi poet of mediaeval Andalusia, Ibn Arabi, whose fervent love poetry both scandalized and transformedIslamic culture, and from Dante, who learned from Ibn Arabi a poetry of sensual love as initiation into spiritual experience.
Brief description: Abdelwahab Meddeb (1946-2014) was novelist and poet who taught comparative literature at the Université Paris X (Nanterre). Meddeb published more than twenty books in French. His La maladie de l'islam, winner of the Prix François Mauriac, has been translated into English as The Malady of Islam.
Review Quotes: Abdelwahab Meddeb is doubtlessly the major Tunisian writer of his generation. This book presents cutting-edge writing that stands out as among the most innovative contemporary work-not only North African, but world-wide-in its genre-breaking narrative investigations via autobiography, poetry, cultural analysis, Sufi meditation, literary reflection & travel writing. Meddeb is a major scholar of Arab culture and a specialist of Ibn Arabi'an Sufism, two areas of knowledge and experience that underlie and buttress the Tomb of Ibn Arabi sequence of texts. The 'alloglot imagination' of White Traverses plays superbly between his writing language (French) and his cultural language (Arabic), as it explores the color (and the word) white in his Maghrebian cultural space and beyond. The color and the space turn out to be a profoundly anti-Mallarmean 'whiteness, ' i.e., a color/space that is never silent but a marvelously voluble process of cascading propositions - a montage of images of 'white' peopled (i.e. in-formed) by a myriad constellations. This is breathtaking writing that has been brought over into English with great care, clarity and felicity by Charlotte Mandell, one of our greatest translators from French at work today.-----Pierre Joris, University at Albany, State University of New York