Baghdad-INA
Spanish publishing house Olifante announced that Iraqi writer, critic, and translator Abdul Hadi Saadoun has won the 11th edition of the “Marcelo Reyes” Translation Award for his Spanish translation of the Arab women’s poetry anthology Nabd Al-Harb Al-Mawhish.
The anthology was published in Spanish under the title El latir desolador de la Guerra by Olifante Publishing House as part of the Papeles de Trasmoz series.
It added that “the award and the book are scheduled to be presented next August as part of the Soria Book Fair in Spain, where Olifante Publishing House grants the award annually to a translated work of foreign literature in commemoration of Marcelo Reyes, one of the prominent figures associated with the publishing house and its poetry festivals in Spain.”
In the introduction to the anthology, Saadoun said that “Arab women’s poetry extends back to early voices in elegy, love, and loss. However, its presence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has acquired a different intensity, with women poets writing from countries torn apart by wars, dictatorships, occupations, displacement, and fractures of identity.”
He noted that “the selections reveal a broad temporal arc, beginning with poets born in the 1960s and extending to voices born with the new millennium,” adding that “the differences in generations and artistic techniques do not negate the shared need to name pain and express it in a distinctive language.”
He added that “translating these voices into Spanish gives them an opportunity to reach other readers and other memories,” considering that “translation in this context goes beyond linguistic transfer to create a space for encounter between diverse poetic and human experiences.”
He explained that “the anthology includes texts by 35 Arab women poets from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. The selected works address themes of war, exile, loss, memory, and the body through female voices belonging to different generations and experiences.”
He added that “the book also features a number of Iraqi women poets, including Rasmia Muheibis Zayer, Najat Abdullah, Samarkand Al-Jabri, Azhar Ali Hussein, Alia Al-Maliki, Aya Mansour, and Duaa Al-Maala.”
Abdul Hadi Saadoun, born in Baghdad in 1968 and residing in Spain since the 1990s, is regarded as one of the most prominent Iraqi figures working between Arabic and Spanish. He has produced works in poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism, in addition to his academic work on Arabic literature in Spain.
