Morocco’s House of Poetry announced Wednesday that Italian Poet Giuseppe Conte has won the Argana International Poetry Award 2022, in its 16th edition.
“Awarding the Italian poet comes to honor the cultural and linguistic dialogue reflected in the structure and meaning of his poem, and the human dimension that this dialogue reveals. Since the 1970s, Conte’s poems have never stopped expanding imagination and horizons with an aesthetic sense fueled by the poet’s own imagination and wide horizons,” said the House of Poetry in a statement.
The House of Poetry grants the Argana International Poetry Award every year in partnership with the Capital Private Equity (CDG) and the Ministry of Culture. The award, worth around $12,000, is presented with a shield and a certificate in a cultural and artistic ceremony.
The jury of this year’s edition included Italian Academic and Translator Simone Sibilio (president), Lebanese writer and publisher Lina Kreidieh, Egyptian poet Ahmed al-Shahawi, poet Najib Khadari, critic Khaled Belqasim, and poet Hassan Najmi (secretary general).
The jury said in a statement that Conte won this year’s award for “his poem promoting dialogue between different languages and views. Conte’s poem expresses a vision in which the western and eastern cultures overlap.”
The statement adds that Conte’s poem features a silent strain stemmed from a “cognitive interest in the difference between the East and the West, and the myths and the paradoxes of the two cultures. But this strain doesn’t lead to any clash; it rather reveals a vital harmony with promising human capacities, because his poem highlights the love that exists in everything, and calls for investing this love in human connections.”
“The dialogue in Conte’s poem doesn’t take one direction, and isn’t limited to his writings about the encounter between the East and the West, but it goes in other directions, including the vertical orientation that prepares for the death-life encounter. In this context, the poet shows keenness to speak to the dead who didn’t stop producing thought and meaning from their unseen places despite their wise silence, extending the horizon of friendships built outside this time,” the statement adds.
Syrian poet Adonis had written the introduction to the Arabic translation of a selection of Conte's poems dubbed “Joy Without a Name”, saying: "His friends / have slept for ages / in languages, without a candle, and without a cover.”
