Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 213
ISBN: 9781781726020
Publication date: October 26, 2020
Price: £12.99
Let Me Tell You What I Saw is the first ever publication as a dual-language (English/Arabic) text of substantial extracts from Adnan Al-Sayegh’s ground-breaking epic poem, Uruk’s Anthem, one of the longest poems ever written in Arabic literature, which gives voice to the profound despair of the Iraqi experience. This superb translation brings the eloquent original Arabic epic to a new readership.
Uruk’s Anthem has been described as beautiful, powerful and courageous and at the same time apocalyptic and terrifying in its unwavering scrutiny of, and opposition to, oppression and dictatorship wherever it occurs in the world. Fusing ancient Arabic and Sumerian poetic traditions with many innovative and experimental features of both Arabic and Western literature, Uruk’s Anthem might best be described as a modernist dream poem that frequently strays into nightmare; yet it is also imbued with a unique blend of history, mythology, tenderness, lyricism, humour and surrealism.
It took twelve years to write (1984-1996). During eight years of that time Adnan was forced to fight in the Iran-Iraq War. Many of his friends were killed and he spent eighteen months in an army detention centre, a disused stable and dynamite store, dangerously close to the border with Iran.
Parts of Uruk’s Anthem were adapted for the stage and performed in 1989 at the Academy of Fine Arts and in 1993 at the Rasheed Theatre in Baghdad where the play received wide acclaim but angered the government. Adnan fled the country with his family and sought asylum first in Amman, then Beirut and then Sweden, where extracts of Uruk’s Anthem, together with the poems of Adnan’s friend, the Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer, formed a play which was performed in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2014 as well as in Egypt 2007 and 2008. It was also performed in Morocco 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2014.
A smaller selection of extracts from Uruk’s Anthem (translated by Jenny Lewis and Ruba Abughaida) was published in English for the first time in Singing for Inanna (Mulfran Press, 2014) a first step towards Let Me Tell You What I Saw. This important, more comprehensive translation includes notes to the text and an introduction by Jenny Lewis, and translation notes by Jenny and by Ruba Abughaida.
Adnan Al-Sayegh
Adnan Al-Sayegh, born in Al-Kufa in 1955, is one of the most original voices from the generation of Iraqi poets known as the Eighties Movement. His poetry carries an intense passion for freedom, love and beauty. Adnan uses his words as a weapon to denounce the devastation of war and the horrors of dictatorship. He left his homeland in 1993, lived in Amman and Beirut, then took refuge in Sweden in 1996. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London.
Adnan is a member of the Iraqi and Arab Writers Unions, the Iraqi and Arab Journalists Unions, the International Journalist Organization, the Swedish Writers Union, the Swedish Pen Club, and English PEN and Exiled Writers Ink.
He has received several international awards; among them, the Hellman-Hammet International Poetry Award (New York 1996), the Rotterdam International Poetry Award (1997) and the Swedish Writers Association Award (2005), and has been invited to read his poems in many festivals across the world.
Let Me Tell You What I Saw, the first dual language English/Arabic translation of large sections of Al-Sayegh’s renowned epic poem Uruk’s Anthem, is available now (Translated by Jenny Lewis and Ruba Abughaida.)
Jenny Lewis
Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator and songwriter who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She has had eight plays and poetry cycles performed at major theatres including the Leicester Haymarket, The Polka Theatre (for children), the Royal Festival Hall and Pegasus Theatre, Oxford where she was a Core Writing Tutor for 20 years. She has also published four full collections of poetry – When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996), Fathom (Oxford Poets 2007) Taking Mesopotamia (Carcanet, 2014) and Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Press, 2018). Two chapbooks in English and Arabic with Adnan Al-Sayegh, Now as Then: Mesopotamia-Iraq and Singing for Inanna (Mulfran Press, 2013/ 14) were published as part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ project which aims to build bridges and foster friendships between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Gilgamesh Retold was a New Statesman Book of the Year, a Carcanet Book of the Year and a London Review of Books Bookshop ‘Book of the Week’ on publication. She is currently completing a PhD on Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths, London University.
Her English/Arabic translation of Adnan Al-Sayegh’s epic poem Uruk’s Anthem, Let Me Tell You What I Saw, was published in October 2020.
Ruba Abughaida
Ruba Abughaida is a poet and author. She has published a collection of poetry called Paths and Passageways in Arabic which was translated into English (published by Albion Beatnik Press in 2019). Her short story ‘The Sirocco Winds’ won first prize in the Writers and Artists Historical Fiction competition in 2014. She translates poetry and fiction in Arabic and English. She holds a creative writing degree from Oxford University and an Master of Studies in creative writing from Cambridge University.
She is currently completing an Master of Studies at SOAS, London University, in Arabic Medieval Thought. Her writing, including short stories, poetry and reviews, has appeared in several publications in the UK, North America and Lebanon.
Ruba worked closely with Jenny Lewis and Adnan Al-Sayegh translating Adnan’s epic poem Uruk’s Anthem into English. Let Me Tell You What I Saw, the first English/Arabic dual language translation of large sections of the poem, is forthcoming from Seren in October 2020.
“This is a book to dwell on, to deepen one’s understanding reading by reading. The introduction, by Jenny Lewis, and the copious footnotes, help the non-Iraqi reader to gather knowledge of the poem’s context and the poet’s wide-ranging cultural references, absorb them and return to the text itself … The imagery, the sensory detail, will in any case speak beyond the limits of translation: the war ‘smokes you like a cigarette;’ ‘we carry our mats like a country/and fold them quickly/whenever the security forces raid us’ … this monumental work of collaborative translation is an exciting, disturbing, enlightening introduction.”
Ruth Valentine, London Grip
“Iraqi poet Al-Sayegh is expertly contextualized and introduced to English-speaking audiences by Lewis in this first dual-language volume … Readers new to the poet will find the momentum and energy of Al-Sayegh’s writing vital and unforgettable. “
Publisher's Weekly
“A wonderfully achieved translation, reimagining a great anti-war epic, or more accurately an anti-epic in a vivid, haunting English with a diction, pitch and music of its own that conveys a wide range of questions, hopes, ironies, griefs and other emotions in their full historical breadth and tragi-comic absurdity.”
Jude Rosen, Long Poem Magazine
‘In Jenny Lewis’ compelling rendering of related extracts from Adnam Al-Sayegh’s Uruk’s Anthem readers are taken on a journey, often harrowing to the emotions yet uplifting to spirit and imagination, from the uncertainties of our war-polluted present back through centuries of painful flux to Uruk (a city still extent), so central to the Epic of Gilgamesh – a work which more and more I believe essential to our understanding of our complex heritage. Jenny Lewis speaks in her Introduction of ‘our’ David Jones, and very fittingly – since the Iraqi poem, like In Parenthesis, conveys the agonies, the bewilderments of the poet’s and his fellows’ grim personal experiences (in the Iraq-Iran War) alongside recognition of the fuller richer truths of their whole human selves, capable of enjoying the challenges of sensuality, the beauty and terror of Nature and of the long, ultimately ineradicable past. A formidable achievement.’
Paul Binding
‘An epic phantasmagoria, Uruk’s Anthem is, nevertheless, often terrifyingly real, with the speaker both a witness to shattering events and also an active participant in trying to make sense of a world in chaos where the poem is the only place where the exile can be at home. At the heart of the book are ordinary people who love, lust, laugh and despair, but are in the grip of vast political, historical, and cosmic forces. Yet despite it all, Al-Sayegh’s monumental work refuses to submit, holding fervently to a belief in the power of poetry to reckon and redeem.’
Niall Munro, Director of Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre
‘It’s Iraq’s collective catastrophe poem. It’s a choir poem, a linguistic flux, a continuous surging of language between words and images…that flows out with the force of a thousand horsepower!’
Sherko Bekas (1940–2013) Kurdish poet and freedom fighter
‘To see such a significant selection from this major work of world literature in this thrilling translation gives me great pleasure. This fine poet of terror and tenderness has found the translators he deserves.’
Leona Medlin
‘The clarity and integrity of Adnan Al-Sayegh’s poems (in translation), combine unforgettably with the music of his native voice. Now his world-class poetry is at last reaching a wider audience in the English-speaking world. That Jenny Lewis’s own work is integral to that process is testimony to a rich and rewarding collaboration.’
Lucy Hamilton
‘This is a kaleidoscopic body of work… It draws widely upon the deep connections made across time and place. Let Me tell You What I Saw is both a testimonial and a rallying cry against injustice.’
The High Window
‘Epic in scope, lyrical and deeply moving, this is a fascinating and powerful work, and a welcome addition to the canon of translated poetry.’
Poetry Book Society
“One of the most important Iraqi poets alive today.”
Dr. Abbas Khadim
