EUME
2008/ 2009

Sinan Antoon

The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry

is a poet, novelist, and translator. He studied English literature at Baghdad University before moving to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War. He did his graduate studies at Georgetown and Harvard, where he earned a PhD in Arabic Literature in 2006. His dissertation was on the 10th century Arab poet Ibn al-Hajjaj. He received a Mellon grant to support his research in 2003. His poems and articles (in Arabic and English) have appeared in various journals and publications in the Arab world, including as-Safir, an-Nahar, al-Adab, Masharef, as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, al-Ahram Weekly, Banipal, World Literature Today, and The Journal of Palestine Studies. He has published a collection of poems in Arabic (A Prism; Wet with Wars, Cairo 2003), which was published in English as The Baghdad Blues in April 2007 by Harbor Mountain Press, and a novel I’jaam (Beirut, 2003) which was published in English in 2007 by City Lights Books. Translations in Italian (Fertinelli), German (Lenos), Portuguese (Globo), and Norwegian are forthcoming. His poetry was anthologized in Iraqi Poetry Today and Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Arab-American Poetry. He has also contributed numerous translations of Arabic poetry into English. His co-translation of Mahmud Darwish’s poetry was nominated for the PEN Prize for translation in 2004. Antoon co-produced and co-directed a documentary About Baghdad (2004), which assessed the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam occupied Iraq. He is a contributing editor to Banipal and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report. He taught at Dartmouth College (2003–2005) and is currently Assistant Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School and a fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
 

The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry

While in Berlin Antoon will be working on a book about “The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry.”