Contemporary Poetry from Iraq by Bushra Al-Bustant: A Facing Page Translation

The translators have accomplished a heroic task in translating a long sequential poem rich in literary, historical and cultural reference, formally complex, out of their mother tongue into English (a near-impossible challenge for any literary translator). They have provided an introduction rich in background material about the particularities and challenges of the Arabic language, Arabic poetry, and translating it into English in particular, from which it is so syntactically and lexically different. But their preface also introduces readers to the poet Bustani, makes her background, her scholarship, her aesthetic and political commitment immediate to us.