Poetry From the June 2008 issue: The Global Gourmet

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Saadi YoussefSaadi Youssef

Saadi Youssef was born in 1934 in Basra, Iraq. He has published thirty volumes of poetry, seven books of prose, and has rendered into Arabic major works by such writers as Walt Whitman, Constantine Cavafy, Federico García Lorca, George Orwell, Nuruddin Farah, and Wole Soyinka. He left Iraq in 1979, and after many detours, working as a journalist, publisher, and political activist, he has recently settled in London.

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Translated from ArabicArabic by Khaled MattawaKhaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa was born in 1964 in Benghazi, Libya, where he received his primary education. In 1979 he immigrated to the United States. He is the author of two books of poems, Zodiac of Echoes and Ismailia Eclipse. Mattawa has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in numerous American journals and have been translated to French and Polish. Mattawa is also the translator of five volumes of Arabic poetry, and co-editor of two anthologies of Arab American literature. He is an assistant professor of English and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently he serves as president of Rawi, Radius of Arab American writers, Inc.

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