James Montgomery is the Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and the Executive Editor of the prestigious Library of Arabic Literature. He is also the author of Loss Sings, the latest in Cahiers Series run by AUP’s Center for Writers & Translators.
This evening, he will read from his cahier and discuss how he came to translate poems written by the sixth-century Arabic poet al-Khansāʾ, whose laments for her dead brothers had always seemed to him to be cliché-ridden, until his own experience of trauma and loss led him to a new connection with them.