Prix Max Jacob

In May 2023 the Prix Max Jacob — the most prestigious poetry prize in France — was awarded to Nouri al-Jarrah in its "étranger" category, which honours poetry written in another language and published in French translation. The winning book was Le Sourire du dormeur, the French edition of «ابتسامة النائم», translated by Antoine Jockey and published in late 2022 by Actes Sud in its Sindbad imprint, at 224 pages.

The award placed al-Jarrah in a line of poets whose names have shaped how French readers understand the twentieth century: Adonis, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Noël, Salah Stétié, Issa Makhlouf, and — five years before him — the Syrian-Kurdish poet Salim Barakat, who took the same prize in 2018.

Le Sourire du dormeur is not a single collection but an anthology, and its architecture is part of its argument. The poems are arranged newest to oldest, so the reader begins in the present catastrophe and travels backwards, through the sea and the war, toward the young voice of the late 1980s. Roughly thirty years of writing are gathered here, from 1988 to 2019.

The selection draws on ten books: مجاراة الصوت (1988), كأس سوداء (1993), صعود أبريل (1996), حدائق هاملت (2003), الحديقة الفارسية (2004), طريق دمشق (2004), يوم قابيل والأيام السبعة للوقت (2012), يأس نوح (2014), قارب إلى ليسبوس (2016), and لا حرب في طروادة (2019). The critic Subhi Hadidi (صبحي الحديدي) took part in choosing the poems.

The poem itself is the real reward; the prize belongs to Arabic poetry, and to Syrian poetry in a hard time.

Read in that reversed order, the book performs something a chronological selection could not. The elegies for the drowned — the boats, the children, the shorelines of Lesbos — arrive first, and everything that follows reads as their prehistory. PLACEHOLDER — contextual reading, to verify against the published critical reception.

The translator's role in this recognition is not incidental. Antoine Jockey, a Lebanese-French translator who has brought a substantial part of contemporary Arabic poetry into French, worked across three decades of shifting register: the early lyric density of مجاراة الصوت, the mythological architecture of حدائق هاملت and الحديقة الفارسية, and the stripped, documentary grief of the later sea poems. The "étranger" category exists precisely to honour that double authorship. PLACEHOLDER — connective passage.

The Prix Max Jacob was founded in 1950–51 by Florence Frank Jay Gould in memory of the French poet Max Jacob (1876–1944). Jacob — a Breton Jew, a convert to Catholicism, a friend of Picasso and Apollinaire, one of the inventors of the modern prose poem — was arrested by the Gestapo and died at the Drancy internment camp outside Paris in March 1944, weeks before he was to be deported.

That biography sits uneasily and appropriately behind a prize given, in 2023, to a Syrian poet in exile writing about deportation, camps, and drowning. Neither al-Jarrah nor the jury made the parallel explicit; the book makes it without them. PLACEHOLDER — editorial reading, not an official citation.

Receiving the prize, al-Jarrah framed it as something other than a personal honour. He described it as a symbolic tribute to Arabic poetry, and to Syrian poetry "in a hard time" — a recognition offered to a literature under siege rather than to one writer. He has said, in his own words, that the poem itself is his real reward.

That refusal of the personal is consistent with the work. The voice in these poems is rarely the biographical "I" of the exiled author; it is more often Odysseus, Cain, Noah, Hamlet, or an unnamed body in the water — figures borrowed from the shared Mediterranean inheritance and made to carry a specifically Syrian catastrophe.

A book that reads three decades backwards — from the war poems of the present to the first voice of 1988.

The French reception treated the book as an entry point into a body of work that had, until then, reached French readers only in fragments. PLACEHOLDER — contextual claim about reception; verify with published reviews before this page goes live.

For readers coming to al-Jarrah from the prize, Le Sourire du dormeur functions as the closest thing to a collected volume in a European language: thirty years, ten books, one continuous elegy that begins at sea and ends at the beginning.

The prize was announced in May 2023, in the same year as his recognition at the Premio Napoli in Italy — two European honours within months of each other, and the widest international visibility his work has had.

PLACEHOLDER — space reserved for the acceptance speech in full, video of the ceremony, and photographs from the award evening, to be supplied by the CMS.