Let Me Tell You What I Saw Extracts from Uruk's Anthem

"Uruk’s Anthem" has been described as beautiful, powerful, and courageous and at the same time apocalyptic and terrifying in its unwavering scrutiny of, and opposition to, oppression and dictatorship wherever it occurs in the world. Fusing ancient Arabic and Sumerian poetic traditions with many innovative and experimental features of both Arabic and Western literature, "Uruk’s Anthem"might best be described as a modernist dream poem that frequently strays into nightmare, yet it is also imbued with a unique blend of history, mythology, tenderness, lyricism, humour, and surrealism. It took twelve years to write (1984-1996). During eight years of that time Adnan was forced to fight in the Iran-Iraq War. Many of his friends were killed and he spent eighteen months in an army detention centre, a disused stable and dynamite store, dangerously close to the border with Iran. Parts of "Uruk’s Anthem" were adapted for the stage and performed in 1989 at the Academy of Fine Arts and in 1993 at the Rasheed Theatre in Baghdad, where the play received wide acclaim but angered the government. Adnan fled the country with his family and sought asylum first in Amman, then Beirut and then Sweden, where extracts of "Uruk’s Anthem," together with the poems of Adnan’s friend, the Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer, formed a play which was performed in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2014, as well as in Egypt 2007 and 2008. It was also performed in Morocco 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2014. A smaller selection of extracts from "Uruk’s Anthem" (translated by Jenny Lewis and Ruba Abughaida) was published in English for the first time in Singing for Inanna (Mulfran Press, 2014) a first step towards this important, more comprehensive translation. Let Me Tell You What I Saw includes notes to the text and an introduction by Jenny Lewis, and a note from Ruba Abughaida, translator.

Ruba Abughaida is a writer of fiction and poetry. She has recently completed an MSt. in creative writing at Cambridge University. She is working on her first historical fiction novel and has published short stories, poetry, literary reviews, and essays, as well as travel writing. She won first prize for an extract from her story 'The Sirocco Winds' in the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook Historical Fiction Competition 2014 and worked with Jenny Lewis and Adnan al-Sayegh in translating poetry from English to Arabic and Arabic to English. Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator, and songwriter who teaches poetry at Oxford University. Her father was born in Blaenclyddach and she comes from a long line of Welsh miners who worked at Trehafod colliery in the Rhondda. She has published four full collections of poetry and two chapbooks in English and Arabic with Adnan al-Sayegh (Mulfran Press, 2013/ 14) as part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ project. Her re-imagining of the Gilgamesh epic, 'Gilgamesh Retold', published by Carcanet in October 2018, was a New Statesman Book of the Year, a Carcanet Book of the Year, and a London Review of Books ‘Book of the Week’ on publication. She is currently completing a PhD on Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths, London University. Adnan al-Sayegh, born in Al-Kufa in 1955, is one of the most original voices from the generation of Iraqi poets known as the Eighties Movement. He left his homeland in 1993, lived in Amman and Beirut, then took refuge in Sweden in 1996. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London. Adnan is a member of the Iraqi and Arab Writers Unions, the Iraqi and Arab Journalists Unions, the International Journalist Organization, the Swedish Writers Union, the Swedish Pen Club, and English PEN and Exiled Writers Ink. He has received several international awards; among them, the Hellman-Hammet International Poetry Award (New York 1996), the Rotterdam International Poetry Award (1997), and the Swedish Writers Association Award (2005), and has been invited to read his poems in many festivals across the world. He has published 11 books of poetry in Arabic and had 13 books of his work published in translation.