Vienna (OTS) – The Ö1 “Soundtracks” are bringing a new series in loose succession: “Findings. “The Library of Unknown Books” is dedicated to forgotten, rediscovered and unfairly neglected books. The focus of the first episode on Tuesday, March 26th at 4:05 p.m. is the Syrian-Lebanese author and translator Fuad Rifka, who saw poetry as the most important bridge between cultures.
The feature “Wanderer between East and West” kicks off the new Ö1 “Soundtracks” series “Findings. The Library of Unknown Books”. The actor Michael König reads Fuad Rifka’s poems and is enthusiastic:
“I fell in love with these texts!” You can hear the poems “Like the steam from the springs” and “Wish”. The music comes from the German composer Klaus Hinrich Stahmer, who worked closely with the poet to set his lyrics to music.
“Like a stone that sinks further and further into the depths of the sea,” is how the poet Fuad Rifka, who died in Beirut in 2011, describes the moment when he read Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” for the first time. He was a philosophy student in Beirut at the time and had a great desire to go to Germany to study German culture, its poets and thinkers. He will find his second spiritual home there. Fuad Rifka was born in 1930 into a Christian family in Syria. In the 1940s, the parents moved to Lebanon, a country that offered exile to many Arab intellectuals until the civil war. Fuad Rifka grew up in a village and studied philosophy in Beirut. He became a co-founder of the important avant-garde magazine SHI’R (Arabic for poetry). He is the first to present modern German poetry. In his own poems he breaks with the strict formal rules of classical Arabic poetry. He is considered one of its most important innovators. His language is simple, no word is too many. With a scholarship, Fuad Rifka finally came to Tübingen and completed his doctorate on Martin Heidegger. He returns to Lebanon and becomes a professor of philosophy in Beirut. His translations of Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis, Trakl and Rilke into Arabic provide access to this poetry in the Arabic world for the first time. In 2010, a year before his death, Fuad Rifka received the Goethe Medal for his services to teaching the German language. A fruitful exchange of the spiritual worlds of the Orient and the Occident, this vision makes Fuad Rifka an important mediator between Arab and European ways of thinking. And although his volumes of poetry are now only considered antiquarian, his texts are more relevant than ever. More information about the Ö1 program is available at https://oe1.orf.at.
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