Overview

This is the first study to examine the Arabic translations of a number of major modern poems in the English language, in particular T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. With case studies dedicated to the Arab translators who were themselves modernist poets, including Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Saadi Yusuf, the author brings a reading of the translations as literary works in their own right. Revealing why the Arab modernists were drawn to these poems through situational context, Ghareeb Iskander shows that the influence exerted by the English originals stems from the creative manner in which the Arab poet-translators converted them into their own language.

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9780755639939

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Reviews

'This book is less a work of literary criticism than a dialogue between poets. Iskandar, himself a poet, is at his best when he is tracing the grain of multiple translations, phrase by phrase, illuminating subtle differences, between the aesthetic possibilities of English and Arabic, and between the visions of individual poets.' -- Michael Beard, Emeritus Professor of English, University of North Dakota, USA Ghareeb Iskander's English Poetry and Modern Arabic Verse is an erudite and insightful journey into the creative process, a methodic study of how translations of mainly Eliot and Whitman by major Arab poets guided their hands and led them to inaugurate a new poetics in Modern Arabic poetry. A valuable reference work for students of translation theory and Arabic poetry. -- Adnan Fuad Haydar, Professor of Arabic Literature, University of Arkansas, USA

Author Information

Ghareeb Iskander is an Iraqi poet and translator living in London. He has published numerous collections of poems including Gilgamesh’s Snake and Other Poems which won Arkansas University’s Arabic Translation Award for 2015 (published by Syracuse University Press in 2016). He translated Derek Walcott’s poems into Arabic. He received his PhD from SOAS, University of London, UK.

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