Description

Revolutionary Communist Arab Poetry:

عبد الوهاب البياتي

Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1926-1999).

Baghdad:  New Culture Publications] 1958.

Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati was an Iraqi poet, who due to his radical communist beliefs spent most of his life in exile, living mostly in hotels in the capitals, such as Beirut, Cairo, Madrid, Damascus, London and Moscow. In the 1960s, Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati was lecturing at the Asian and African People’s Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

In his lyrics Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati’s distances himself from traditional structures of Arabic poetry and tries to create a new, liberal verse. The motifs of his texts are often connected with international events such as Spanish Civil War and Cuban Revolution, and involve names such as Che Guevarra and Federico García Lorca.

The book Poems in Exile was heavily influenced by the 1952 Egyptian revolution and 1956 Suez crisis. It was translated to Russian and published in Moscow in 1958 and a year later in a Chinese translation in Beijing.

This is a second edition, published in Baghdad a year after the first edition. We could not find any institutional examples of this edition on Woldcat.