The Traces They Wish to Leave

Contact: Tel: 020 7420 9887, poetrycafe@poetrysociety.org.uk

Presented by Sebastian Hayes and featuring:

Mr. Robert Yates, contemporary poet and translator from French, German and Ancient Egyptian will be presenting excerpts in verse and prose from the works of Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) in his own translations.. He will also be talking about Baudelaire’s life and his influence on other writers e.g. on Rimbaud and Lovecraft.

The Iraqi writer Mr. Salah Niazi will be talking about the poetic skills shown by the author of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest major works of literature in the world. He will also read excerpts from some of his own poems.

Mr. Salah Niazi went into voluntary exile in 1963 and worked as the head of the cultural unit at the BBC Arabic Service, during which time he completed his PhD at the University of London. In 1984 he became editor of Alightirab al-Aladabi Mag.(catering for Arab writers in exile). He has published more than twenty books including ten collections of poetry & and five books of criticism (amongst them a critical study of the Epic of Gilgamesh), and has translated Macbeth , Hamlet, The Old Capital by Cawabata, and 12 chapters from James Joyce’s Ulysses into Arabic.

Price: £5.00 / £3.00

Time: 7:30pm