Somali Poetry

Wednesday, 22 January 2025

Andrzejewski (1922-1994) spent an academic career studying Somalia. He first went to Somalia in 1950. This book, Somali Poetry, was published in 1993. It is a compilation of translated poems, with a little commentary on the text and brief notes about the poets. The poems themselves largely focus on camels, women and war (he writes at the outset of the book due to gendered spaces he was only able to collect poems from male poets). I found this book when doing some work on Amharic proverbs. This is a unique book, but one with quite a specialist audience.