Abu Nuwas: Le Vin, Le Vent, La Vie

Abû Nuwâs; choix de poèmes traduits de l'arabe et présentés par Vincent-Mansour Monteil; calligraphies de Hassan Massoudy.

Arles : Actes sud; Montréal : Leméac, 2009.

The Dawn of Peace

Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Fajr al-salām, 1st ed. (Ṭarābulus: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī; Bayrūt: Dār al-ʿAwdah, 1974)

This edition includes a Foreword by Nājī ʿAllūsh and Iḥsān ʿAbbās's chapter on Fajr al-salām from his biography about Sayyāb. The poem was originally published in a chapbook in 1950.

The Committee, by Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm

From the 1982 Maṭbūʿāt al-Qāhirah edition, published in the spring and illustrated by the Egyptian artist Ṣalāḥ ʿInānī, born in 1955. You can find many of his playful portraits of everyday Egyptians online; the images in this edition of Ibrāhīm's modern classic The Committee carry a distinct hint of Ralph Steadman's drawings, particularly those he made of Hunter S. Thompson. Consider, for instance, The Doctor, whom ʿInānī portrays with jackboots, spectacles, and a menacing smile complete with a companion bird. He makes the stuff of nightmares oddly playful, and therefore jarring, uncanny, but all too real.