Late this fall, Tenement Press will be bringing out a selection of work by the celebrated Lebanese-Australian poet Wadih Saadeh, titled A Horse at the Door. The book, forthcoming December 10, will bring together a “chronology” of Saadeh’s poems, drawing from collections published between 1968 and 2012.
“Another Light” (ضوء آخر) comes from Saadeh’s 2006 collection, تركيب آخر لحياة وديع سعادة (Another Configuration of the Life of Wadih Saadeh).
Another light
On the high mountain he closed his eyes
not wanting the old light, come walking
thousands of years to reach him.
He closed his eyes and came down
to the valley,
….where the floor
whose light is not got from the sun
but from the gaze of stone on stone.
Wadih Saadeh was born in 1948 in the village of Chabtine in northern Lebanon. Tenement Press writes that, as a young man, “he moved to Beirut where he first began to write poetry and where, in 1973, he would distribute handwritten copies of his first collection, The evening has no siblings. He lived and travelled between Beirut and Europe—Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus—until in 1988 he finally emigrated with his family to Australia, where he lives now: ‘a village farmer, resident in Sydney.’
He has been a figure of central importance in the development of the Arabic prose poem, but has been little-published in English translation. Anne Fairburn published a collection of his poems with the title A Secret Sky (1997), which is excerpted from a single collection: Saadeh’s 1992 collection Because of a cloud most probably. A Horse at the Door is the first real overview of his work.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared widely. His most recent publications include Strangers in Light Coats (Seagull Press, 2023)—a collection of the poems of Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan—and Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories Press, 2023) which was a joint winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
Find more of Saadeh’s work at Tenement Press, where pre-orders are available.