Gilgamesh’s Snake and other poems soon to be published

21st January 2016

Ghareeb Iskander & John Glenday first met in Erbil during our Reel Iraq poetry translation project in 2013. Since working together in Iraq, the pair of award-winning poets have continued working on new translations and we are very excited that Syracuse University Press has announced the publication of a bilingual edition of Iskander’s Gilgamesh’s Snake and Other Poems on May 16 – the winner of the 2015 King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the greatest surviving work of early Mesopotamian literature. According to legend, Gilgamesh built the city walls of Uruk, modern-day Iraq, to protect his people from external threats. Although the epic records events from more than four thousand years ago, those events echo many of the social and cultural concerns of Iraq today.

In this bilingual collection Iskander offers a personal response to the epic. Iskander’s modern Gilgamesh is a nameless Iraqi citizen who has witnessed the fall of the dictatorship, who exists in a constant state of threat, and who dreams, not about eternity, but simply about life. While the ancient story chronicles Gilgamesh searching for the elixir of life, Iskander’s contemporary hero is merely searching for consolation.

Excerpts from Gilgamesh’s Snake can be found in This Room is Waiting – our bi-lingual anthology of contemporary Iraqi & Scottish poetry available from Freight books: http://www.freightbooks.co.uk/this-room-is-waiting.html

Our hearty congratulations to both Iskandar & Glenday for this achievement. Here’s a video of Iskander & Glenday reading together at the Reel Iraq festival in 2013.

Pre-order your copy via the publisher or alternatively through Amazon UK