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Al-Sayegh's poetry is, naturally, informed by his own experiences of persecution, war and exile, But this is poetry with powerful resonances that go far beyond the merely personal. It negotiates with the ancient history of the poet's land of birth, as in its references to Uruk, the ancient city in Southern Mesopotamia, one of the first significant urban centres in world history (and possibly the place where writing began), the most important city - administratively and politically, as well as in religious and cultural terms - of one of the most significant phases of Mesopotamian civilisation. This was, in legend, the city of Gilgamesh himself. The tragic historical ironies of what has happened to Iraq (the very name of which may well be derived from 'Erech' the Aramaic name of Uruk) are a powerful undercurrent in almost all that Al-Sayegh's writes.
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The poetry of Al-Sayegh, naturally enough, also has its dealings with Islam. Significantly, this volume contains two poetic encounters with Al Hallaj (c. 857-922) one of the most controversial and unorthodox figures in Islam. A Sufi Mystic, al-Hallaj, was regarded by some as a saint and miracle worker; to others, especially those in positions of religious authority, he was a dangerous heretic, since the emphasis he placed on the depth and intensity of the spiritual relationship an individual could have with God seemed to come close to identifying God and man.
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I don't have the Arabic to comment in detail on the individual English versios by Stephen Watts and Marga Burgui-Artajo, but what I can say is that almost all of them read well and convincingly in English, and that the translators have found language and rhythms to do justice to the forceful rhetoric of the originals. My judgement is (and it is a judgement confirmed by a reader whose Arabic is rather netter than mine) that these translations are essentially faithful too. The whole is a fine, and valuable, piece of work.
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Xenia is a two part sequence of 14 poems, made up of two sets of 14 poems, if which the first set was published in a limited edition in 1966, which Montale wrote following the death of his wife Drusilla Tanzi in 1963. In 1927 the 30 year old Montale met, and fell in love with the 27 year old Tanzi, ,myopic and married. NIcknamed 'mosca' (the Fly), she and Montale were to marry in 1958 after her husband's death. Before that, Montale had also met the woman who appears in his poetry as 'Clizia'. The 'real' figure behind Clizia is now known to have been the American scholar (of Danteand the Italian mystics) Irma Brandeis. Montale met her in Florence early in the 1930's. But the poems here translated by Petrucci are very specifically concerned with Drusilla Tanzi, affectionately elegiac, often movingly so, though their rhetoric is low-key and their music subtle. Indeed, the originals are deceptively simple. Even a reader whose Italian is somewhat less than fully fluent can easily persuade him / herself that s(he) understands the poems. To translate them well needs genuinely good Italian, an understanding of Montale's music and an ability to create English verse of a similar sublety. Mario Petrucci seems to me to have very largely succeeded in doing this - I, at least, find his versions generally more successful than, for example, those by Kate Hughes, William Arrowsmith and Ghan Shyan Singh.
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