Baghdad, Adieu

Selected Poems of Memory and Exile

Salah Al Hamdani

Translated by Sonia Alland

Forthcoming

 

5 x 8.5 inches, 264 pp. June 2018

ISBN : 9780857425447

Rs  599.00 (HB)
$24.50 (HB)
£18.99 (HB)

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Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, he learned to read and write Arabic; once he was released form prison, he continued to work against the regime, ultimately, at age twenty-one, choosing exile in Paris. He now writes in French, but he remains a poet of exile, of memory, wounded by the loss of his homeland and those dear to him.
 
This landmark collection gathers thirty-five years of his writings, from his first volume in Arabic, Memory of Embers, to his latest collection, written originally in French, For You I Dream. It offers English-language readers their first substantial overview of Al Hamdani’s work, fired by the fight against injustice and shot through with longing for the home to which he can never return. 

Salah Al Hamdani was born in Baghdad in 1951. He is the author of some forty books in both Arabic and French. He lives in France.  
 

 

Sonia Alland divides her time between New York and southern France, where she lives in the same village as Marie Bronsard. With her anthropologist husband, Alland has collaborated on Crisis and Commitment (1994) and Catalunya: One Nation, Two States (2006). Her translation of Bronsard's The Hermitage appeared in 2001.

Fiction
Arab List
Poetry