"To Flee from All Languages": The Gap Between Language and Experience in the World of Modern Arab Poets

Steiner maintains that in order to articulate the wealth of consciousness opened to which modern sensibility is exposed, true modernist Western poets sought to break out of the traditional confines of syntax and definition. In his book of essays, al-Nass al-Qur'anl wa Ajaq al-Kitaba ("The Quranic Text and the Horizons of Writing," 1993), AdQnTs seeks to delineate his conception of the poetic quandary which confronts every modernist poet or author. The modernist awareness that language is afflicted with an innate inability to genuinely portray "the things" (al-Ashy')-the objects of reality in Adunis's poetic diction- pervades the works of many prominent modernist Arab poets.