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T. S. Eliot in Baghdad: A Study in Eliot's Influence on the Iraqi and Arab Free Verse Movement

Author: 
Year:
Pages:304
ISBN:0-7734-0074-5
978-0-7734-0074-0
Price:$219.95
The book sheds new light on the revolutionary influence of Eliot’s poetry on the free verse movement in Iraq and Lebanon, especially on the mythical poets: Al-Sayyab, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Yusuf Al-Khal, Khalil Hawi and Adonis known as the Tammuzi Poets. The writer is one of Eliot’s best translators and who personally knew all five of the modern mythical poets.

Reviews

“Readers of modern poetry in translation have long been in need of exactly what this book offers us, an acute reading of the cultural contexts of modern Arab language poetry. Sattar Jawad elucidates the tremendous challenges these poets faced in bringing their art into the 20th century.”
-Professor Joseph Donahue,
Department of English,
Duke University

Table of Contents

Foreword by Joseph Donahue
1 – Eliot’s Influence on the Iraqi Free Verse Movement

I. The Battle Between Tradition and Modernity
II. The Reception of “The Waste Land”
III. The Poem of the Century
IV. Reading “The Waste Land”
V. Translating “The Waste Land”
2 – Eliot’s Children or the Wastelanders
I. The Quest for National Salvation
II. Al-Sayyab (1926-1964)
III. The Golden Bough-From Ritual to Romance
IV. Adonis / Tammuz
3 – Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
I. The Clash of Literary Genres
II. In Defense of Poesy
III. Jabra and Al-Sayyab
4 – Yusuf Al-Khal
I. The Launching of Shi’r Magazine
II. The Literary Climate of the Forties and Fifties
III. Al-Khal’s Translation of “The Waste Land”
IV. Shi’r Magazine
V. The Prose Poem
5 – Khalil Hawi
I. A Sufi Surrealist
II. Hawi and Eliot
III. Hawi and the Myth of Tammuz
IV. Lazarus
6 – Adonis
I. A Sufi Surrealist
II. Religion
III. Tradition
IV. Modernity and Symbolism
V. The Phoenix
VI. Whitman-Eliot-Adonis
VII. Al-Naffari
Appendix: The Waste Land in Arabic
Notes