Book record
Baghdad, Adieu
Salah Al Hamdani
Translated from Arabic by Sonia Alland
Baghdad, Adieu, by Salah Al Hamdani, is a Arabic poetry collection from Iraq, translated by Sonia Alland, published by Seagull Books in 2019. It is a farewell book in the deepest sense, carrying Iraq not as abstraction but as city, wound, address, and impossible beloved. Rather than forcing the poems into a clean thesis, I would let the book remain somewhat unruly. Translation is useful exactly there, where the English line carries both arrival and residue. What matters is the reader's permission to sit with that residue until feeling arrives before explanation. That small hesitation matters, because poetry often begins where summary stops being enough.
- Published
- 2019
- Publisher
- Seagull Books
- Language
- Arabic
- Country
- Iraq
- ISBN
- 9780857425447