Scan barcode
A review by kyatic
Modern Sudanese Poetry: An Anthology by Adil Babikir
4.0
Thanks to Netgalley and the University of Nebraska Press for sending me an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
This was a really, really interesting book. I found the introduction particularly illuminating; like most people in the West, I would imagine, I know very very little about Sudan and its history and culture, so having the introduction to ground the poems in a rhetorical tradition was really helpful when it came to appreciating them.
There's a good mixture of subjects in this book, although the thing that struck me most was the sheer number of poems that were explicitly about Sudan and its history, the blood and tears that have been spilt in its name. There were so many poems that were essentially love songs to the land, even though the land has been so mistreated and the people have suffered so much for it. I think if you were to publish a compendium of poetry from France, for example, very few would be about the land itself. It was striking to me how the history of a place is indelibly inked on the people and the broader cultural consciousness. I would never even think about having to suffer for my own country's independence, and it was enlightening to read how it feels for those who do; how there's more than just pain there, but pride, too. I did find that a lot of poems, perhaps because they were translated by the same individual, sounded the same; it was hard to discern different authorship in many cases, with the exception of three or four very distinct voices (mostly women - this collection definitely has a gender bias, with very few female poets).
My only real bugbear with this book was that I feel the translation may have been a bit heavy-handed at times. I'm sure this is because there are concepts in Arabic which just don't translate well into English, but it made for some quite bizarre syntax and phrases; the phrase 'roaming dervish' was used in multiple poems, and it's just not something that I could parse. Much of that is my own cultural context, though, and I wouldn't say it's a bad thing; it's just something to consider for those who, like me, are coming at this poetry from a completely uneducated perspective. There are notes at the end of the book which help mitigate this.
A very interesting read, and I absolutely feel like I understand if not the history then the humanity of the poems in this collection. I haven't come out of it an expert in Sudan or Sudanese culture by any means, but it's given me a connection to the place I see in news reports that I think is absolutely vital for those who only ever see the name Sudan in connection to war and violence. The way a place is presented to us absolutely colours how we think of it, and this collection of poetry could not come at a more urgent time.
This was a really, really interesting book. I found the introduction particularly illuminating; like most people in the West, I would imagine, I know very very little about Sudan and its history and culture, so having the introduction to ground the poems in a rhetorical tradition was really helpful when it came to appreciating them.
There's a good mixture of subjects in this book, although the thing that struck me most was the sheer number of poems that were explicitly about Sudan and its history, the blood and tears that have been spilt in its name. There were so many poems that were essentially love songs to the land, even though the land has been so mistreated and the people have suffered so much for it. I think if you were to publish a compendium of poetry from France, for example, very few would be about the land itself. It was striking to me how the history of a place is indelibly inked on the people and the broader cultural consciousness. I would never even think about having to suffer for my own country's independence, and it was enlightening to read how it feels for those who do; how there's more than just pain there, but pride, too. I did find that a lot of poems, perhaps because they were translated by the same individual, sounded the same; it was hard to discern different authorship in many cases, with the exception of three or four very distinct voices (mostly women - this collection definitely has a gender bias, with very few female poets).
My only real bugbear with this book was that I feel the translation may have been a bit heavy-handed at times. I'm sure this is because there are concepts in Arabic which just don't translate well into English, but it made for some quite bizarre syntax and phrases; the phrase 'roaming dervish' was used in multiple poems, and it's just not something that I could parse. Much of that is my own cultural context, though, and I wouldn't say it's a bad thing; it's just something to consider for those who, like me, are coming at this poetry from a completely uneducated perspective. There are notes at the end of the book which help mitigate this.
A very interesting read, and I absolutely feel like I understand if not the history then the humanity of the poems in this collection. I haven't come out of it an expert in Sudan or Sudanese culture by any means, but it's given me a connection to the place I see in news reports that I think is absolutely vital for those who only ever see the name Sudan in connection to war and violence. The way a place is presented to us absolutely colours how we think of it, and this collection of poetry could not come at a more urgent time.