Kadhim J. Hassan is a poet, literary critic and translator. Born in southern Iraq in 1955, he has lived in France for more than forty years. A professor of classical Arabic literature and literary translation in Paris at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), he has translated Dante, Rimbaud and Rilke, among others, into Arabic. He has written several essays on the poetics of translation, among them La Part de l’étranger – la traduction de la poésie dans la culture arabe (Editions Actes Sud/Sindbad, 2007). In 2016, he was awarded the Gerardo de Cremona international prize for translation.