Reise zum Mount Tamalpais

A literary journey through the life of an Arab intellectual, who is as distinguished as she is versatile, between the Lebanon, Paris and California. Novelist and artist Etel Adnan, who was born in Beirut in 1925, reads from her book 'Reise zum Mount Tamalpais', which has now been translated into German for the first time, and talks about her encounter with the mountain. The Miwok Indians say that the Coyote created human beings here.

For more than twenty years, Etel Adnan occupied herself with Mount Tamalpais. And while she repeatedly captured it in pictures, she reflected on the act of painting, on dreams and on myths. In a talk with her translator, Klaudia Ruschkowski, she integrates this experience into stages of and reflections on her life, as described in her letters: 'Von Frauen und Städten'.

Hitherto unpublished translations of poems from Etel Adnan’s ‘Lindentree’ cycle form the third point of reference in this portrait of a lyric poet and philosopher who, time and again, has also pointedly taken a stand on the roots of the conflicts in the Middle East, as she did recently in her interview with Catherine David for the project DI/VISIONS (Winter 2007/08 at the House of World Cultures)

Host: Klaudia Ruschkowski

Staged in co-operation with Edition Nautilus