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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Vital Literary Contribution, August 25, 2003
This review is from: Iraqi Poetry Today (Paperback)
This translation was not produced to serve as an intellectual distraction for academic elites, nor enchanted minds lounging in pricey cafes. Instead, it is a serious attempt to "save what remains of Iraqi humanity and culture in the face of dictatorship and war" (5). Indeed, under the current turmoil of post-war occupied Iraq, the publication of Simawe and Weissbort's translation is more urgent than ever.
The volume represents several major styles of Arab and Kurdish poetry, and subjects range from love, mourning, war, dictatorship, politics, exile, religion, to personal and artistic repression, as well as the oppressive regime that existed under Saddam Hussein. At the time of printing, all but five of the poets in the volume lived in Western exile. Included are biographies of the translators as well as the poets, a feature that often helps to inform the poems. What do readers find among these biographies, Islamic fundamentalists? Hardly. Instead, we have what might otherwise appear as a nexus of contrasts: doctoral students, journalists, educators, a youth counselor and author of children's book, editors, a former Iraqi Kurdistan Minister of Culture, a computer manufacturer, translators, graduates and students of American universities, poets who are also playwrights and essayists; and, in general, a large assembly of prolifically published writers whose world views span a wide breadth of politics and religion. Although broadly regional, the poems are far from being culturally naïve or parochial, and they continually evoke a mythically-imbued solicitude for not just traditional regions or settings such as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but even the gods, kings, queens, literary dissidents, warriors, and cities of both ancient Iraq and the ancient Western world.
As one may imagine, some themes are treated more frequently than others, especially war and exile. Exile, for instance, is often inscribed in subtle depths of elegy that invoke an intense element of dispossession. Very often such dispossession brings about a near uncharacteristic sense of despair. Other poems in the volume are less imagistically or symbolically complex: there are simple love poems redolent of a Sufi inheritance as they employ an erudition beyond Arab literary and cultural borders, and others that are uncomplicated verses of patriotism, or are more-or-less common revolutionary polemics. As one may expect, America is not spared from the poets' inquiry. And yet, there are sharp words for mankind at large.
This compilation is a work of meticulous research and labor, one that outside of just a few unremarkable poems is an immense literary contribution to humanity from a world with an exigent need for our tolerance and understanding.
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