Taha Muhammad Ali (1931–2011)

In an important sense one's never finished with a book of poetry, so I'll mark this as Read, having read pretty much everything in it once or twice, though I'm certainly not finished with it. The poet's death on October 2nd, at the good age of 80 and after a tumultuous and highly unlikely life, occurred just before the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to a Swedish 80-yer-old poet, also widely translated, which is an occasion for a sort of wistful regret: how wonderful in a dozen ways it would have been for this prize to go to a Palestinian.

So What contains a very small part of Taha's published work, so we can think more translations will be forthcoming. I was delighted on ordering this book that it's in both Arabic and English, but the Arabic isn't transliterated, so one can't get a sense of how it might sound. It would be a boon if future translations included transliterations as well as the original language. YouTube, meanwhile, will help a bit: there are videos of Taha reading in Arabic followed by his English translator reading; these poetic performances shouldn't be missed; see the top items here:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=taha muhammad ali&aq=1sx&oq="taha mohamm
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