Dr. Daniel Behar, Department of Arabic Language and Literature
Arabic language and literature arrived at my doorstep in a brown envelope addressed to my name from Prof. Sasson Somekh. This envelope contained the gift of my first reading experience in Arabic and the first Arabic book I ever owned: a memoir by the Jewish-Karaite Egyptian author Maurice Shammas, Izza: Daughter of Nefertiti, in which the author recounts his Egyptian youth and the course of his romantic relationship with his wife. The book enchanted me not only for being an authentic example of modern Arab-Jewish creativity but also because the family of my mother, the novelist Ronit Matalon, had also immigrated from Egypt. With this text I began burrowing my way through the Arabic language, while also using a tattered second-hand copy of the Ayalon-Shinar Arabic-Hebrew dictionary. I became fond of the sluggish pace dictated by the long-winded Arabic sentences, and this demanding yet pleasurable challenge brought me to the Arabic Language and Literature Department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
During my studies at the Hebrew University, my horizons were opened to the endless riches of the classical Arabic canon and the traditions of thought and expression sedimented in Arabic letters. I see modern literature as working in a dialectic of continuity and change with ancient notions of ibda’ (creativity) cultivated by classical literature. The modern Arabic literature in which I’m interested combines imaginary flight, rigorous intellect, inventiveness, wit, and civility, just like its old predecessor of adab literary culture.
My research focuses on modern Arabic poetry in its interconnections with the classical tradition and with world poetry. I received my doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University with a thesis titled “The New Austerity in Syrian Poetry.” My thesis traces the making of the modern prose poem in Baathist Syria through contact with poetic journals in Beirut, the socialist literary world, and translations from Western and Eastern European poets.
Following my years at Harvard, I won a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dartmouth College, where I was affiliated with programs in Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Comparative Literature. There I began working on my current book manuscript titled Under a Low Ceiling: Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity. I also led interdisciplinary seminars on Arab-Jewish culture, love poetry in translation, and Jerusalem.
In my research and teaching, I stress the importance of using comparative methods and reading critically in translations for understanding the Arabic literary system. Just as no nation dwells alone in the world, so no literature is distinguished enough to be excluded from global interconnectedness and dynamics of translational exchange.
If you are interested in what’s happening in modern Syrian fiction today and curious about its responses to the ongoing civil war, check out this article I wrote for the digital literary review magazine Public Books: https://www.publicbooks.org/a-collapse-no-one-story-can-tell/
Academia profile: https://huji.academia.edu/DanielBehar