Keynote
New poetry by Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, one of the major voices from the Arab world
Book Title
Nostalgia, My Enemy
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- "[Youssef's] poetry is inseparable from Iraq's recent turbulent history but it also captures the eternal and ephemeral moments of existence. . . . Antoon and Money's translations capture the tender, ephemeral quality of the original, receptive to every nuance of the Arabic."—Banipal
Body
The country we love was finished
before it was even born.
The country we did not love has claimed
the blood left in our veins.
—from “A Desperate Poem”
This book collects some of the best of Saadi Youssef’s most recent poems from the last decade, since the ongoing American-led war in his home country of Iraq. In direct, penetrating language, translated from the original Arabic by Sinan Antoon and Peter Money, Youssef’s poems dwell on the casualties of the war, the loss of his country, the role of the writer in exile, the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, and the inhumane acts perpetrated by American military at Abu Ghraib. What emerges is the powerful voice of a writer for whom “Poetry transforms in that intimate moment which combines the current and the eternal in a wondrous embrace.”
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About the Author
Praise
- "Saadi Youssef's poems in Nostalgia, My Enemy maintain much of the lucidity and rage that must be present in the original Arabic. . . . Youssef [has the] ability to tackle the personal as well as the political, all with a light, lyrical hand."—Hazel and Wren
- “One of the greatest living poets writing in Arabic. . . . Youssef’s poems are heart-rending love letters to a country that has been brutalized by violence and ethnic strife.”—Wasafiri
- "Ever since I read Saadi Youssef he became the closest to my poetic taste. One finds the lucidity of a watercolor painting in his transparent poems and the rhythm of daily life in their soft tone. . . Saadi Youssef, whose poetry is in dialogue with the history of poetry, is like no other Arab poet."—Mahmoud Darwish
- “Saadi Youssef was born in Iraq, but he has become, through the vicissitudes of history and the cosmopolitan appetites of his mind, a poet, not only of the Arab, but of the human universe.”—Marilyn Hacker
