English Poetry and Modern Arabic Verse: Translation and Modernity - Paperback

by Ghareeb Iskander (Author)

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 Landand 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.

Author Biography

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.