Sargon Boulus

Sargon Boulus was born in Iraq. Sargon is well known as an accomplished translator into English. Born into an Iraqi Assyrian family and growing up in Al-Habbaniyah, Kirkuk and Baghdad, he started publishing his own work in 1961, in the ground-breaking Shi’r [Poetry] magazine in Beirut. After settling in San Francisco in the late 1960s, he became an unstoppable translator of most of the major English-language modern poets into Arabic and many others, and dedicated his life to reading, writing and translating poetry, every so often making forays to Europe to meet up with fellow exiles and perform at festivals. He has already translated poems of such authors as Ezra Pound, Shakespeare, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Robert Duncan and many other poets including Rilke, Neruda, Vasko Popa and Ho Chi Minh. He died in Berlin, October 2007.