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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > State of Emergency

State of Emergency

The poems in this collection are lucid, moving and sometimes shocking. Rooted in Algerian experience, they speak of urgent concerns around the world: oppression, resistance, state violence and private dreams and traumas.

The introduction to this volume by Lisa Appignanesi makes a powerful argument for the importance of Guémar’s poetry in bringing an understanding to the world outside of Algeria of the political, social and artistic repression that exists in that country today. She writes:

‘In Soleïman Adel Guémar, Britain has inadvertently inherited a political poet of stature, one whose language sings whether he is attacking the face of grim authority or dreaming of that other asylum which is an imagined Algeria of peace…Deceptively casual, colloquial in their idiom, always dramatic in their pessimism, Guémar’s poems are a searing howl against the brutality which invades everyday Algerian life…This volume marks an important moment: a record from the inside of a history which is too palpably of our times. Where before we had only newspaper headlines, stereotypical Algerians, or the dry, if conscientious, reports of NGOs, we now have a living voice, both political and lyrical – an intensely individual voice which speaks out freely and traces the lineaments of a tragic history.’

Author

Soleïman Adel Guémar

Soleïman Adel Guémar

Books

State of Emergency

Soleïman Adel Guémar was born in Alger in 1963 into a left-wing political family of Berber ancestry. He studied electrical engineering in the army, spent 2 years in France working in publishing, then, at the promise of free national elections, returned to Algeria in 1991 to work for the weekly newspaper L’Evènement. The elections were cancelled when an Islamist party won a landslide at local elections and L’Evènement was banned. For 10 years, Guémar worked in Algeria as a freelance journalist and publisher, but when he applied for a permit to publish a magazine of investigative journalism, he fell foul of the regime and was subjected to a campaign of violent intimidation. In 2002, he arrived at Heathrow claiming political asylum and has since been granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, where he now lives with his family in South Wales.

Translator

Tom Cheesman

Tom Cheesman

Books

State of Emergency

Tom Cheesman was born in Liverpool and grew up in County Durham. He is a senior lecturer in German at Swansea University, a volunteer with the Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Support Group, and a trustee of the charities DPIA (Displaced People in Action) and Croeso. He lived in Germany and France before settling in Swansea in 1990. He helped edit Home and Away: Diaspora Voices (Index on Censorship 2002).

John Goodby

John Goodby

Books

State of Emergency

John Goodby is a critic, poet, translator and arts organiser. An expert on modern Irish poetry, he is also a world authority on Dylan Thomas, editor of the new annotated edition of the Collected Poems (2014) and author of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013). He is the Director of the Dylan Thomas Research Project within CREW, a Fellow of the English Association, and advises the British Council, BBC, AHRC, Literature Wales and other bodies marking the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth in 2014.

Projects include: a website and translation app based on Dylan Thomas’s poetry, a collection of essays on Irish poetry, a monograph on Welsh modernist and alternative poetry 1930-2010 and the anthology to go with it, and various poetry collections and translations.

Published by

Arc, 2007
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The poems in this collection are lucid, moving and sometimes shocking. Rooted in Algerian experience, they speak of urgent concerns around the world: oppression, resistance, state violence and private dreams and traumas.

The introduction to this volume by Lisa Appignanesi makes a powerful argument for the importance of Guémar’s poetry in bringing an understanding to the world outside of Algeria of the political, social and artistic repression that exists in that country today. She writes:

‘In Soleïman Adel Guémar, Britain has inadvertently inherited a political poet of stature, one whose language sings whether he is attacking the face of grim authority or dreaming of that other asylum which is an imagined Algeria of peace…Deceptively casual, colloquial in their idiom, always dramatic in their pessimism, Guémar’s poems are a searing howl against the brutality which invades everyday Algerian life…This volume marks an important moment: a record from the inside of a history which is too palpably of our times. Where before we had only newspaper headlines, stereotypical Algerians, or the dry, if conscientious, reports of NGOs, we now have a living voice, both political and lyrical – an intensely individual voice which speaks out freely and traces the lineaments of a tragic history.’

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