Knife Sharpener

Knife Sharpener

Knife Sharpener was started in the months before the author, Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus died, and was eventually published as a posthumous celebration and commemoration of the renowned poet, with a collection of poems, written between 1991 and 2007 that he translated himself, together with an essay, “Poetry and Memory”, written especially for this volume in April 2007. It includes a Foreword by Adonis and Introduction by Irish poet Pat Boran, along with tributes and appreciations by fellow Arab poets Saadi Yousef, Ounsi El-Hage, Amjad Nasser, Abbas Beydoun, Abdo Wazen, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Khalid al-Maaly, and Elias Khoury and an Afterword by the publisher Margaret Obank. "Sargon seemed to feel also the even greater, historical weight of conflicts, tensions, misunderstandings and oppressions of the spirit, as if his poems came through his own time and language but from somewhere else." --Pat Boran Sargon Boulus (1944–2007) remains one of Iraq’s best contemporary poets. Born into an Assyrian family in Iraq, and growing up in Al-Habbaniyah, Baghdad and Kirkuk, he started publishing his own work in 1961, in Shi’r [Poetry] magazine in Beirut. After settling in San Francisco in the late 1960s, he became an unstoppable translator of English-language modern poets into Arabic and dedicated his life to reading, writing and translating poetry, every so often meeting up with fellow exiles in Eurpe and performing at festivals. He died in Berlin, October 2007, at the aged of 63. Adonis is the foremost poet of the Arab world. He was born Ali Ahmad Said in Kassabeen, Syria, in 1930, and adopted the name Adonis when he was 17. He co-founded the modernist Sh’ir poetry magazine and later formed Muwaqaf magazine. He is an internationally renowned poet, essayist, and theoretician of poetics and has championed democracy and secular thought in the Middle East for years. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Goethe Prize, the Spiros Vergos Prize and in 2017 PEN American Lifetime Achievement Award. Many of his works have been translated into English and other languages. Pat Boran is a well-known award-winning Irish poet, based in Dublin. A former Programme Director for the Dublin Writers Festival, editor of Poetry Ireland Review and presenter on RTE Radio, he received the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 1989, and has published seven collections of poetry and some short story collections. His books have been translated to a number of languages, including Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Macedonian and Greek.