Review of Montgomery & Sieburth’s ‘Antarah

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: There’s a batch of between seven and ten very old poems that, I’m told, every educated Arabic-speaker knows. All introductions to all translations of these poems say this. Unfortunately, these pieces are notoriously untranslatable—which is not to say they can’t be Englished and explained. You can do that; the thing you can’t do is make the result graceful.

[originally posted Wednesday 6 March 2019]