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Simple Balance
May 18, 20227:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62).
7:00 p.m.
Free entry until the room’s capacity is reached.
In Spanish.
Casa Árabe and the Bala Perdida publishing firm are presenting the
latest collection of poems by Iraqi poet Abdulhadi Sadoun, at a meeting
to be attended by the writer in Madrid on Wednesday, May 18.
Life goes by within a labyrinth, a symbolic space which, in this book, represents memory and today’s experience of existential drama, and perhaps also other dramas more concrete in nature. Passage through the labyrinth, with its own intricate geometry of complex lines, shapes life’s twisted pathway. Life is no easy undertaking. Nor is it easy to inhabit¾or to be occupied by¾the unforeseen glow of poetic revelation, a surprise that presents itself to us as an incitement to knowledge about dark space, “the labyrinth which names the things / that are not known.”
Simple Balance (Sencillo equilibrio) seems to hold aloft the overlapping bodies of acrobats in a circus. We know that achieving such an effect of volatile lightness comes after many hours of careful training and major vigilance.
Simple Balance (Sencillo equilibrio) seems to hold aloft the overlapping bodies of acrobats in a circus. We know that achieving such an effect of volatile lightness comes after many hours of careful training and major vigilance.
(From the prologue by Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo).
During the event, the cultural review Byron Magazine will also be presented. Byron is a magazine sponsored by Shasel in which fashion and culture go hand in hand to offer quality content to the new dandy of the twenty-first century. This edition of the free magazine includes interviews with Abdul Hadi Sadoun and Vicente del Bosque.
The author, Abdul Hadi Sadoun, the novelist José Ángel Mañas and the founder of Byron Magazine, Joan Arrey, will all be attending the event. When the presentation ends, Spanish wine will be offered on Casa Árabe’s terrace.
Abdul Hadi Sadoun. (Baghdad, Iraq, 1968). Writer and Hispanist. Holder of a PhD in Philosophy and Letters from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, he is currently a professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His poetry has received various acknowledgments: the Second Antonio Machado Scholarship (Antonio Machado Foundation, Soria, Spain, 2009), Distinguished Guest of the City of Salamanca (2016) and the Ninth Distinction for Poets from Other Worlds (International Poetry Fund, 2016). He has authored a long list of books in both Arabic and Spanish, the most notable of which include: Siempre Todavía (Always Forever, 2010), Campos del extraño (The Stranger’s Fields, 2011), Memorias de un perro iraquí (Memoirs of an Iraqi Dog, 2016), Todos escriben sobre el amor menos tú (Everyone Writes About Love But You, 2018), Informe sobre el robo (Report of Theft, 2020) and El jardín del Harén (The Harem Garden, 2022). He has translated over 30 books from Spanish into Arabic, by notable Spanish-language authors, including Cervantes, Antonio Machado, Lorca, Borges, Alberti, Bécquer, Vila-Matas and Javier Marías. He has edited several anthologies of Iraqi poetry in Spanish.