Böcker av Ghareeb Iskander

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, Ghareeb Iskander 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, 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.

In this luminous bilingual collection of poems, Ghareeb Iskander offers a personal response to the The Epic of Gilgamesh. Iskander's modern-day Gilgamesh is a nameless Iraqi citizen who witnessed the fall of the dictatorship, who exists in a constant state of threat, and who dreams, not about eternity, but simply about life.