Let Me Tell You What I Saw: Extracts from Uruk's Anthem

by Adnan Al-Sayegh, Ruba Abughaida (Translation), Jenny Lewis (Translation)

"Uruk’s Anthem" has been described as beautiful, powerful, and courageous and at the same time apocalyptic and terrifying in its unwavering scrutiny of, and opposition to, oppression and dictatorship wherever it occurs in the world. Fusing ancient Arabic and Sumerian poetic traditions with many innovative and experimental features of both Arabic and Western literature, "Uruk’s Anthem" might best be described as a modernist dream poem that frequently strays into nightmare, yet it is also imbued with a unique blend of history, mythology, tenderness, lyricism, humour, and surrealism. It took twelve years to write (1984-1996). During eight years of that time Adnan was forced to fight in the Iran-Iraq War. Many of his friends were killed and he spent eighteen months in an army detention centre, a disused stable and dynamite store, dangerously close to the border with Iran. Parts of "Uruk’s Anthem" were adapted for the stage and performed in 1989 at the Academy of Fine Arts and in 1993 at the Rasheed Theatre in Baghdad, where the play received wide acclaim but angered the government. Adnan fled the country with his family and sought asylum first in Amman, then Beirut and then Sweden, where extracts of "Uruk’s Anthem," together with the poems of Adnan’s friend, the Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer, formed a play which was performed in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2014, as well as in Egypt 2007 and 2008. It was also performed in Morocco 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2014. A smaller selection of extracts from "Uruk’s Anthem" (translated by Jenny Lewis and Ruba Abughaida) was published in English for the first time in Singing for Inanna (Mulfran Press, 2014) a first step towards this important, more comprehensive translation. Let Me Tell You What I Saw includes notes to the text and an introduction by Jenny Lewis, and a note from Ruba Abughaida, translator.

206 pages, Paperback

Published December 26, 2020

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

How strange. There are no other reviews of this book on Goodreads, while poetry books that are little more than a record of the writer's neurosis, written in chopped prose, are getting rave reviews.
Though everything you need to know about this book is in the accompanying Goodreads blurb at the top of this page.

Sometimes it's hard to shake the impression that the most interesting poetry is currently being written in Languages other than English, and we are fortunate in the current crop of translators who have done great work in making it available.

'Let me tell you what I saw', which is only part of a longer 'Uruk's Anthem', incorporates elements from Sumer and its stories, to modern Iraq and its terrors, with the Modernist poets of the English speaking world getting a walk on role in places. It's both specific to its place and time, and international. It should be a mess, but the surge of the language and the images hold it all together.

At the centre of the poem is an /I/ trying to survive, and perhaps make sense of history and his place in it. A very human /I/, who is not an ideological position.

It doesn't sound like a translation either. Jenny Lewis and Ruba Abughaida have produced an English poem which may need their detailed footnotes, but which sings in modern English.

You know a book's good when you discover it is only selections from the whole poem and wonder how hard it would be to learn Arabic in order to read the rest.

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Traumatised by war and prison, love and sex, exile and poetry, this is a mosaic of haunting fragments with an extravagant range of references across eastern and western cultures. It should be a mess but it is a miasma of wonders.