Fuad Rifka

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Fuad Rifka (born December 28, 1930 in Kafroun near Tartus , Syria ; † May 14, 2011 in Beirut ) was a Syrian-Lebanese professor of philosophy, poet and one of the most important translators from German into Arabic. Together with Adonis and Mahmud Darwish, he was one of the innovators of Arabic poetry . Above all, his translations brought Rainer Maria Rilke and Friedrich Hölderlin closer to many readers in the Middle East; both authors also influenced his own clear imagery without complicated rhetoric.

Life

Fuad Rifka came from a Christian family and came to Lebanon as a child with his family, where he grew up in the village. He studied in Beirut . He came to Germany on a DAAD scholarship and received his doctorate in Tübingen on Martin Heidegger in 1965 . Between 1966 and 2005 he taught at the Lebanese-American University in Beirut .

His special love was the German language. As early as 1957 he was a co-founder of the magazine SHI'R (Arabic for poetry ) and translated, among others, Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl , Novalis and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe .

Honors

Works

  • The series of days a single day [poems Arabic-German, translated by Fouad el-Auwad], Schiler, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-89930-147-2 .
  • The valley of rituals [poems Arabic-German, epilogue by Stefan Weidner, translated by Ursula and Simon Yussuf Assaf , Stefan Weidner], Straelener Manuskripte, Straelen 2005, ISBN 978-3-89107-052-9 .
  • Diary of a wood collector [poems Arabic-German, translated by Ursula and Simon Yussuf Assaf], Heiderhoff, Eisingen 1990, ISBN 3-921640-86-5 .

Settings

Although Fuad Rifka's poetry is very well suited for a musical presentation in terms of its language and the content of the lyrics, it has not yet been properly discovered by the composers. However, the differences between the individual settings reveal that there is particular artistic potential here. In 2005 the Swiss conductor and composer Andreas Brenner (* 1972) wrote the song “Schafott” for soprano, alto saxophone and piano using a poem by Fuad Rifka. It is part of a song cycle about death called "Sycamores".

In the years 2008/09 the German composer Klaus Hinrich Stahmer worked with Fuad Rifka on a CD on which both Rifka's poems and Stahmer's settings can be heard. Rifka will read 13 of his poems in Arabic under the title “Gesänge eines Holzsammlers”, the German version of which will be performed by Horst Mendroch. The sequence of texts is interrupted and commented on by Stahmer's text-related pieces of music, with an Arabic zither ( Kanun ) also being used in the piece of music "Zikkrayat" (memories) . The result is the composition “Aschenglut” for Arabic frame drum and piano, which premiered in Hamburg in 2014. Here, too, shorter passages from Rifka's poetry can be heard in Arabic.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ PEN American Center: Fuad Rifka ( Memento of April 9, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Obituary for Fuad Rifka in Qantara.de , accessed on May 17, 2011
  3. ↑ Information on the DAAD website , accessed on December 12, 2010
  4. ↑ Artist CD (Wergo / 2010); Order no.ARTS 81092
  5. ↑ Klaus Hinrich Stahmer: Zikkrayat for Qanun solo, Berlin 2010; ISBN 978-3-7333-0575-8
  6. ↑ Araxie Altounian: East Meets West - Some Lebanese and Armenian input ; New York Concert Review March 2, 2014.
  7. ↑ Kreuzberg Records (2016) order no. kr 10122
personal data
SURNAME Rifka, Fuad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fu'ad Rifqa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Syrian-Lebanese philosophy professor, poet and translator
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Kafroun, Syria
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 2011
Place of death Beirut , Lebanon