Elias Sanbar
إلياس صنبر
Historian, translator, and diplomat
Carried out of Haifa as an infant in 1948, he became the historian of Palestinian photography, Darwish's French translator, and Palestine's ambassador to UNESCO.
Elias Wadih Sanbar was born in Haifa in 1947 and was an infant when his family left the city in 1948. He grew up in Lebanon and then in France, where in the late 1960s he was active in the French branch of the General Union of Palestinian Students. In 1969 he travelled with Jean-Luc Godard to Jordan and Lebanon, where the filmmaker was meeting Palestinian fighters for the project that became Ici et ailleurs.
His scholarship began with the founding gap: Palestine 1948, l’expulsion, published in 1984, examined the expulsion year itself. In 1981 he co-founded the Revue d’études palestiniennes — the French-language sister publication of the Institute for Palestine Studies’ journals — and edited it for twenty-five years, making it the principal venue for Palestinian scholarship in French. He has also written extensively on photography and Palestine, arguing that the country’s visual record was assembled largely by outsiders and needs to be read against itself.
Sanbar is Mahmoud Darwish’s principal translator into French, including Le Lit de l’étrangère (2000), and much of Darwish’s French readership comes through his versions. He is the State of Palestine’s ambassador to UNESCO — the post from which Palestinian heritage nominations are pursued — and a member of the Palestine National Council. His photographic history The Palestinians won a Palestine Book Award, and he has received the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture.
Selected works
- Palestine 1948, l’expulsion (1984)
- Les Palestiniens: la photographie d’une terre et de son peuple de 1839 à nos jours (2004)
- French translations of Mahmoud Darwish, including Le Lit de l’étrangère (2000)
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.