We originally ran this poem, by Syrian Kurdish author Jan Dost, in 2020. Dost’s first novel to appear in English, Safe Corridor, is coming next year in Marilyn Booth’s translation.
Normalcy in Every War
By Jan Dost
Translated by Mey Dost
At the beginning of the war
we counted the casualties daily
then we counted them hourly
and when the battles became more brutal
we counted the massacres.
And when the fighters went insane
and the war set up its bloody tent over the whole country
we started counting the destroyed cities.
Eventually nobody died anymore
there were no massacres anymore
and no cities that could have been bombed.
The war was not over,
but those who used to count the casualties
had all died in the same war.
Jan Dost is a Syrian Kurdish novelist, poet and translator who lives in Germany. Dost was born in Kobani in 1965. He writes poetry, short stories and novels in Arabic and Kurdish, and won many awards, including the Kurdish Short Story Award in 1993 and the Kurdish Poetry Award in 2012. Among his best-known translations is The Epic of Mem and Zin written by the acclaimed Kurdish poet Ahmad Khani.
Mey Dost can be found at @meydost.