Dr. Simona Smaranda Farcasan,
Library of the Romanian Academy, Romania
The layers of memory and exile are deep in al-Andalus, whose fate was to live only in the hidden spaces of our intimacy, in our mind’s eyes, in our hearts or in our dreams, wherefrom the art of memory extracts the precious shards alchemically transmuted into verse. Condemned to fictional survival, al-Andalus found herself in the heterotopic mirror of a poetry that made the absent context dramatically present and struggled to build up a memory palace (Menocal 2002) proclaiming an eternally nostalgic and impossible return. The reconstruction of the lost home, doomed to become manifest just in the elusive language of a literary text, is still able to generate a history and mythology that shape reality, a reality in a way quixotically mediated by the century long Arab tradition of allegiance to the written text. To understand how the obstinately individual memory deals with the experience of loss and converts it into poetry, our research touches upon the articulation of exile motifs in the texture of poetic language and discusses the reconstruction of long gone or vanishing contexts in the same medium.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Fourth Annual International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.LLLD.IR), 1-2 February 2020, Iran-Ahwaz.