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Abu Dhabi's Kalima Publishes Biggest Arabic Selections of American Poetry
The Kalima Project has translated and published approximately a thousand poems of contemporary American poetry.
The selection and translation of fifteen male and female American poets, belonging to different movements and tendencies in American poetry of the twentieth century, was undertaken by Samer Abu Hawash.
This initiative forms part of Kalima’s continuing effort to present different world cultures to the Arab reader.
Dr Ali Bin Tamim, director of Kalima, describes this project as very necessary because contemporary and modern American poetry has been largely inaccessible to the Arabic reader and Arab culture.
Many American poems have been translated and published in anthologies and literary magazines.
But the availability in Arabic was limited to a very small proportion of American poetry from a period when it was actually expanding and becoming more differentiated and the Arabic translations did not present more than some tens of important literary examples when there are literally hundreds that contemporary world literature cannot ignore.
The new selections take the form of an anthology, that is to say a presentation of samples from the works of poets between the covers of a single book.
They also constitute another selection, namely of a large number of contemporary American poets whose contributions have now been made available in Arabic to a sufficient degree and in a comprehensible form.
This selection of poets includes both sexes and a majority belong to the second half of the twentieth century.
The period witnessed a number of important experiments and currents such as Confessional Poetry, Post-[Second World] War, Objectivist Poetry, the Beat Generation and other movements which influenced world and particularly European literature in the same way as physical events such as wars and the environment.
The present scheme seeks to include a majority of these experiments in its translation.
It releases fifteen contributions that stand out in terms of their names, output and importance within the movement of contemporary American poetry.
The poets included in the scheme are: Billy Collins, Langston Hughes, Charles Bukowski, Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Louis Gluck, Anne Sexton, Kim Addonizio, Archie Ammons, Florence Anthony (Ai), Dorianne Laux, Charles Simic, Theodore Roethke, and Ted Kooser.
Middle East Online