On Love and Language is best understood as a curated Arabic portrait of Etel Adnan rather than a single originally unified book. Fawwaz Traboulsi gathers prose pieces and poems that Adnan herself had selected for publication in Bidayat, the quarterly he helped found, then appends the final interview he conducted with her shortly before her death. The book moves between the father and childhood in Beirut, writing in a foreign language, the cost of love, poems on Beirut and Baalbek, Mayakovsky and Neruda, and distilled meditations on night and death. The closing interview frames the whole volume as a deliberately shaped testament.
On Love and Language
في الحب واللغة
Notes
Texts originally selected for Bidayat; ends with Traboulsi's last interview with Adnan, conducted about two weeks before her death.