Maybe this year I was not very successful in more than half of my endeavours, but at least I succeeded in reaching one goal: reading more poetry, both in original and in translation. For the end of the year, I offered myself another gift of poetry, while listening to the Anthology of Arab Poetry, as audiobook, in the French reading of the French-Moroccan baritone of Jewish origin David Serero.
The book is relatively short to listen to - around 30 minutes - and covers an impressive time amount - ambitiously, it promises from the origins until the current times. It´s an ambitious aim limited by time and definitely subjective as a personal choice. I was particularly pleased by listening to a translated poem by the Iraqi poetess Nazik al-Malaika whose works are not easy to find for the non-Arabic reader (an edition of a bilingual Arabic/English translation of her poems was recently published and will be happy to get my eyes and the soul on it soon).
Traditionally, France has a good amount of literate Arabic-speakers therefore biased or not for cultural reasons, I may embrace faster a French translation instead of translations from non-Natives to other languages.
This collection may be just a grain of sand but it does good to a late winter evening of a year like no other. I´ve listened to the audiobook more than once and would probably do so again and again a couple of times.
Rating: 4.5 stars
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