Tese two new collections of translated Arabic poetry represent the work of eight different translators: five 'bridge' workers and three English poets. Both are bilingual, with English as the dominant language.
[...]
Facing-page editions are () a growing trend in translated Arabic poetry, encouraging readers to see the English in the immediate context of its 'original'. The bilingual reader jumps from one side to the other: comparing, considering what might be done differently. Even the non-Arabic reader, for whom the language stands as object, can at least check formatting and punctuation. For better and worse, this structure shapes a reader's and a translator's choices.
[...]
Pages from the Biography of an Exile is so relentlessly forward-moving that the reader has little time to pause and look at the Arabic. The poems begin in the 1980's, when the narrator was a conscript in the eight-year Iran-Iraq border war. They follow him as he speaks against power, considers exile, and finally leaves Iraq for cold and distant Sweden, and later for England. The collection leaps from place to place, and sometimes circles back in time. Yet there is a powerful narrative arc, a character who comes into being.
From the start, Pages grabs the reader by the back of the neck and takes them into the smells and confusions of war. These poems are raw, panting, sometimes awkward, and throw the reader from the battlefield to home and back.
[...]
Humiliation is a leitmotif, although it's leavened by the book's humour, which first appears fittingly in a short poem written in Cairo, one of the capitals of Arab comedy. 'Absence' takes the narrator off to an exile in his dreams, where he's woken by customs men at the border:

It was then that he realized the bartender
Was shaking him roughly:
Where are you off to in your dreams
You with your bill not yet even paid.

The collection also gives us an idea of the delicate position of the Iraqi poet in the second half of the twentieth-century.
[...]
Al-Sayegh's personal poetry is part of the movement away from praising viziers and kings, as well as away from grand narratives and social causes. As the collection takes us to a permanent exile in Europe, the narrative voice changes, growing both more frenetic and lonely. "Who will protect me from cold and fatigue and prying eyes? / Lonely I gulp down boredom and the dregs left on bar tables" ('Pages from the Biography of an Exile'). Many of the poems reflect the narrator's relationship to the cities in which they were written.
[...]