PUBLISHER / EDITOR Margaret Obank ASSISTANT EDITOR Samuel Shimon COVER ARTIST Youssef Abdelké CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Khaled Mattawa Saadi Youssef Peter Clark Fadhil al-Azzawi Mona Zaki Sargon Boulus CONSULTING EDITORS Naguib Mahfouz Etel Adnan Mohammed Bennis Herbert Mason Gamal el-Ghitani Hilmy Salem Marilyn Hacker Erdmute Heller Roger Allen Yasir Suleiman Hisham Sharabi Khaled al-Karaki Saif al-Rahbi Mohamed Ali Farhat EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Dessy Pontikos COPY EDITOR Deborah Horton LAYOUT Ben Branagan

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Tel: +44 (0)20 8568 9747 Fax: +44 (0)20 8568 8509 e-mail: editor@banipal.co.uk website: http://www.banipal.co.uk PRINTED BY Short Run Press Ltd Bittern Road, Sowton Ind. Est. EXETER EX2 7LW ISSN: 1461-5363 Photographs not accredited have been donated, photographers unknown © All material: Banipal, authors, translators and artists. All rights reserved.

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Banipal takes its name from Ashurbanipal, last great king of Assyria and patron of the arts, whose outstanding achievement was to assemble in Nineveh, from all over his empire, the first systematically organised library in the ancient Middle East. The thousands of clay tablets of Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian writings included the famous Mesopotamian epics of the Creation, the Flood, and Gilgamesh, many folk tales, fables, proverbs, prayers and omen texts. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

CONTENTS No 19, Spring 2004 002 Tribute to ABDELRAHMAN MUNIF (1933-2004)

from Banipal, Abdo Wazen, Abdu Khal, Abdallah al-Ghathami, Sa’ad al-Bazei, Gamal el-Ghitani and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid. Interview by Eskandar Habache 014 Tribute to MOHAMED CHOUKRI (1935-2003)

with photographs from his life with writers 019 EDITORIAL 020 Mohammed Bennis – Profile & Poems

21 James Kirkup – letter to Mohammed Bennis 32 Ghalia Kabbani Dreams of a Well-Bred Girl 18 Abdo Wazen Selected Poems 44 Zahir al-Ghafri Selected Poems 50 Mohammed Sof A Very Marginal Man 50 Joumana Haddad Five Poems 058 Latifa Baqa – short story Bad Soup! 061 Ebrahim al-Khaldi Two poems

62 Ziad Khaddash The Absence of a Sister 65 Youssef al-Mohemeed Three Poems 66 Ahmad Nuaimi The Dictator’s Delicacy 068 Hassan Nasr Four Short Stories 0 75 Marwan Ali A poem 0 76 Mohja Kahf Two poems

79 FEATURE ON IRAQI AUTHORS 79 Fawzi Karim Selected Poems introduced by Saadi Simawe 89 Kadhim Jihad The Iraqi landscape in the early poems of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

93 Lutfiyya al-Dulaimi What the Storytellers Did not Tell 100 Golala Nouri Three Poems 101 Najim A Mustafa – Tales from Three Bags of Raisins 105 Kadhim al-Hallaq Three Short Stories 108 Abid Jaafar A Maze of a House 115 Mahmoud Sa’id Bitter Morning 117 Samuel Shimon Two Poems 118 Salima Saleh Those Boys 122 Sinan Antoon – Excerpt from novel Diacritics 129 BOOK REVIEWS 129 Richard McKane Miracle Maker, selected poems of Fadhil al-Azzawi

132 Margaret Obank Adama by Turki al-Hamad 136 Anthony Thwaite Zodiac of Echoes by Khaled Mattawa 138 Margaret Obank The World’s Embrace by Abdellatif Laâbi 140 James Kirkup Continent de douleurs by Fawzi Karim 145 Susannah Tarbush Fatma by Raja Alem 148 James Howarth The Bleeding of the Stone by Ibrahim al-Koni and Saeed the Pessoptimist by Emile Habiby 150 Shakir Mustafa Where the Rivers Meet by Herbert Mason 152 Mona Zaki Qawarib Jabaliyyah by Wajdi al-Ahdal 155 Hassouna Mosbahi James Joyce in Tunisia 159 CONTRIBUTORS and TRANSLATORS

BANIPAL NO 19, SPRING 2004 1