Sargon Boulus’s ‘Baudelaire’s Pain Arrived’
In this evocative 1969 poem, translated by Miles Cayman, Sargon Boulus writes: “my bankruptcy grew into a bird, / my love into an ember.”
Sargon Boulus
New Poetry: Sargon Boulus’s ‘A Story’
In this brief poem by Boulus, translated by Miles Cayman, “Suddenly by chance and without warning / The table had / Vanished, the guests dispersed[.]”
Read the Re-Issue of Sargon Boulus’s 1971 Literary Anthology, ‘Tigris’
In 1971, the great, maverick Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus published a single issue of an English-language literary anthology that he called Tigris.
Friday Finds: Dreams of Iman Mersal and Sargon Boulus
Two new dream poems have recently appeared in translation, online.
Arabic Translation Challenge: ‘An Angel Appears’
“The beginning, we choose. / But the end chooses us. / And there is no road but the road.”
6 Poems: The Self-translations of Sargon Boulus
“In Sargon’s poems, the figure of the poet-translator manifests itself through the stranger who is constantly departing and arriving, with blurred memories of the journey itself.”
Iraqi Literature in Translation: A Brief Introduction
Yet Iraqi literature continues, somehow, to blossom. There are older writers Fadhil al-Azzawi and Muhammad Khudayyir still at work (although the former in exile), and much younger ones, too: Thirtysomething Iraqi Hassan Blassim has been called “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive.”
For Your Thursday Afternoon: (Arab and) Arabic Poetry
Adonis is still working on poetry, but next—his memoirs.
The Under-appreciated Sargon Boulus
Sinan Antoon has a new Boulus translation in today’s Jadaliyya: “The Corpse”. Coming on the heels of the Nobel-lit three-ring circus (who will it be? it should be Adonis! it should be…!), the poem made me reflect on how little-known the towering, excellent Boulus is in English—outside of Banipal readers.
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