Identity area
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Title
Date(s)
- 1988 (Creation)
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Ffeil / File
Extent and medium
1 envelope
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Scope and content
Material relating to the production of Tony Curtis's collection of poems Taken for Pearls, published by Seren Books in 1993 (see, for example: https://www.serenbooks.com/book/taken-for-pearls/), which includes a series of love poems translated from the dialect of the Iraqi Marsh Arabs by Mustafa Hadi of the Polytechnic of Wales's Civil Engineering Department and subsequently adapted poetically by Curtis, the poems having been originally written by Iraqi poet and political critic Muthaffar al-Nawab (or Muzaffar al-Nawwab). This section of the archive includes a letter to Curtis from Hadi and Curtis's draft adaptations from Hadi's translations, with amendments in both Hadi's and Curtis's hands, together with photocopies of photographs taken from The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger, first published in 1964 (see, for example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/432391.The_Marsh_Arabs).
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- English
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Note
Iraqi poet and political critic Muthaffar al-Nawab (or Muzaffar al-Nawwab) was born in Baghdad into an aristocratic family of Indian origin and studied at the University of Baghdad, where he joined the Iraqi Communist Party. He was renowned for his powerful revolutionary poems and scathing invectives against Arab dictators. His earliest writing employed the southern Iraq dialect because he believed that the region was more revolutionary; however, the use of that particular dialect failed to garner a mass audience, and he eventually switched to classical Arabic in his later works. The first complete Arabic language edition of his works was published in London in 1996. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muthaffar_al-Nawab)
Explorer and travel writer Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger is best known for two travel books - Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs (1964), the latter an account of the Madan, the indigenous people of the marshlands of southern Iraq. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/432391.The_Marsh_Arabs)
Alternative identifier(s)
Access points
Subject access points
Place access points
Name access points
- Hadi, Mustafa Ghazi Abdul (Subject)
- al-Nawab, Muthaffar, 1934-2022 (Subject)
- Thesiger, Wilfred, 1910-2003 (Subject)