Abdelwahab Meddeb, Sufi Poets, and the New Francophone Lyric

While In New Haven In October 1993, The Tunisian French writer, public intellectual, and Sui specialist Abdelwahab Med deb (1946-2014) began composing the poem Les 99 stations de Yale ("he 99 Stations of Yale"). he slim chapbook was published in 1995 by the small Languedoc-Roussillon press Fata Morgana, whose heteroclite catalog showcases limited-run artistic reeditions of modern and avant-garde classics. he press also curates innovative emergent voices that push the limits of the new lyric hybridity (Sastri 191) characteristic of French and American poetry today. Operating out of the land of the troubadours and close to the birthplaces of the major Sui poets and philosophers of al-Andalus, Fata Morgana has been cultivating a unique southern French and Mediterranean poetic identity. he second of Meddeb's ive chapbooks with the press, Les 99 stations de Yale captures its author's indebtedness to European, especially French, high poetic modernism; to the French literary turn to the United States (Hollier 1064); and to the author's desire to be read in the lineage of the great Sui poets of classical Arabic literature, in whose spirit he re imagines the francophone lyric. Patterned ater the lives of Sui poets and saints, the circles of Sui worship, and the circularities of Arabic literature and Islamic philosophy, Meddeb's lyric seeks mystic sublimation of the beloved-an idealized union with the ob jet d'amour-through formal structure, thematic content, intertextuality, and translational ingenuity. © 2016 gillian silverman.