Saadi Youssef's work is quieter than his Iraqi peers — closer to Cavafy than to Mahmoud Darwish — but no less disillusioned. He lived in London for the last decades of his life and translated Walt Whitman, Wole Soyinka, and Federico García Lorca into Arabic.
Recurring themes
the quiet exile lyric
Iraq remembered
translation as poetic practice
the late lyric of the Arabic left
Selected works
- 1952The Pirate
- 1965Far from the First Sky
- 1976Iraqi Nights
- 1991Without an Alphabet, Without a Face