EyeontheEast – Eye on the East

October 12, 2025October 12, 2025

Pablo Neruda: Poetry (and Fiction) and the ‘Products of Mankind’

Since the Nobel Prize has been in the news lately, here is a related story that’s worth revisiting.

In his acceptance speech upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, Chilean poet, writer, and diplomat Pablo Neruda transformed his dramatic ordeal through the treacherous Andes Mountains to Argentina escaping political prosecution, into a testament to the fundamentality of poetry – and subsequently art itself – in making us human and making our lives matter.

June 9, 2023June 11, 2023

“Hope is a Dangerous Thing”

There was a time when everything I ever wanted was to be in Beirut, the beloved home, the enchantress of the Mediterranean, the city that – as the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism would once have it – “will never surrender.” But that changed, and well before the socioeconomic crisis turned our lives upside down, and the blast ensured that our lives would never and could never be the same again. The moment had come for a serious recalibration of my relationship with the city. The invitation to be a contributor to German literary magazine Die Horen’s special issue on Beirut gave me the first chance to do so, at least on paper.