Synopsis
The Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika was one of the most important Arab poets of the twentieth century. Over the course of a four-decade career, her contributions to both the theory and the practice of free verse (or tafʿilah) poetry confirmed her position as a pioneer of Arab modernism.
Revolt Against the Sun presents a selection of Nazik al-Malaʾika’s poetry in English translation for the first time. Bringing together poems from each of her published collections, it traces al-Malaʾika’s transformation from a lyrical Romantic poet in the 1940s to a fervently committed Arab nationalist in the 1970s and 1980s. The translations offer both an overview of her life and work and an insight into the political and social realities in the Arab world in the decades following the Second World War.
Featuring a comprehensive historical and critical introduction, this bilingual reader reveals this groundbreaking poet’s role in transforming the landscape of modern Arabic literature and culture in the twentieth century. It is a key resource for students and teachers of Arabic and world literature, as well as for readers interested in discovering an alternative narrative of modern Iraqi culture.
About the Authors
Nazik al-Malaʾika was born in Baghdad in 1923. After graduating from the Iraqi Teachers’ Training college in 1944, she received a Rockefeller Scholarship to study at Princeton University from 1950-51 and went on to earn a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1954. In addition to publishing seven poetry collections, four full-length works of literary criticism, and dozens of articles in the most widely read Arabic literary periodicals of the time, she also taught literature at the Teacher’s Training College in Baghdad, at Basra University, and at the University of Kuwait. She died in Cairo in 2007.
Emily Drumsta is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She has published articles in Research in African Literatures, Social Text and Middle Eastern Literatures, and has a chapter in the forthcoming volume The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation. Her translations from Arabic have appeared in McSweeney’s, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, and ArabLit. She was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Grant for Revolt Against the Sun.
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