Adnan Al Sayegh, Jenny Lewis and Philip Terry | Stanza Poetry Festival | In Person & Online

TRANSLATING GILGAMESH. This reading will present three contrasting approaches to rewriting the Epic of Gilgamesh, originally written in Akkadian in the late 2nd millennium BC. Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh will read (with translations from Jenny Lewis) from Let Me Tell You What I Saw  (Seren 2020) and from his epic poem Uruk’s Anthem, which he wrote while a conscripted soldier, and later a detainee, in the Iran-Iraq war. Both draw upon Gilgamesh. Jenny Lewis’s interest in Gilgamesh sets out from a sense of culture as permanently unstable and open to different contested interpretations. In Gilgamesh Retold, she responds to (and seeks different narratives and endings within) the ancient Mesopotamian epic tale. Finally, Philip Terry will share excerpts from Dictator, his experimental recreation of the epic using the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish (a business language invented to record business transactions), plus poems from his new work, The Lascaux Notebooks. This event is live in St Andrews, and will also be livestreamed on the Stanza YouTube channel. To book for the live event visit: www.stanzapoetry.org/events/translating-gilgamesh and for the livestream on YouTube visit: www.stanzapoetry.org/events/translating-gilgamesh-online