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Friday Finds: Poetry ‘At That Outcast and Lonely Hour’
On Monday, Robin Moger posted four new translations: The first two were of the great Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (“Meeting with an Arab poet in exile“) and contemporary Egyptian poet Ahmed Yamani...
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Ashraf Fayadh Wins 2017 Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression
PEN International yesterday announced two winners of its 2017 Oxfam Novib/PEN Awards for Freedom of Expression: stateless Palestinian-Saudi poet Ashraf Fayadh (of Palestinian heritage, raised in...
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Friday Finds: ‘The Exquisite Engineering of Geography’s Tumult’
Two poems by Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh (@AsmaaAzaizeh) are in the latest issue of Asymptote: They are “Do Not Believe Me Were I to Talk to You of War” and “I Didn’t Believe I Would Ever Learn to...
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Spoken-word Poet Afra Atiq: Placing the Individual at the Heart of Her...
Emirati spoken-word poet Afra Atiq (@a_afra) was born in Dubai and is one of an emerging group of Emirati spoken-word poets. Atiq has said she first stumbled across spoken-word poetry during a visit to...
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There’s Something in One of Wadih Sa’adeh’s Poems
“There’s something in one of Wadih Saadeh‘s poems,” the narrator writes in section 12 of Youssef Rakha’s Crocodiles, a novel with a Bolañoesque obsession with the shapes and shapers of poetry: Rakha’s...
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10th Anniversary Readings For Al-Mutanabbi Street
Next month will mark the tenth anniversary of the bombing of Baghdad’s al-Mutanabbi Street, the city’s historic bookselling corridor. The “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here” movement has organized more...
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Sunday Submissions: Etel Adnan Poetry Series Seeking Manuscripts
Etel Adnan Poetry Series judges Fady Joudan and Hayan Charara are still seeking entrants for this year’s Etel Adnan Poetry Prize: The prize, co-sponsored by the University of Arkansas Press and the...
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Palestinian Poet Ahmed Dahbour, Friend of Mahmoud Darwish, Dies at 71
Celebrated Palestinian poet Ahmad Dahbour died Saturday at a Ramallah hospital after a struggle against kidney failure: Dahbour (1946-2017) was born in Haifa, but his family fled to Lebanon in 1948,...
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Four Poems by Amjad Nasser
These four short poems by Jordanian writer Amjad Nasser — about the (delirious) cycles of our bodies, our knowledges, our families — were translated by Atef Alshaer: Delirium Joy Garnett, “Strange...
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Forthcoming: ‘I Don’t Want This Poem to End,’ New Collection of Work by and...
Interlink Books recently added to their website a page for I Don’t Want This Poem to End: Early and Late Poems, by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Mohammad Shaheen, with an introduction by Elias Khoury:...
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A New Translation of El-Abnoudi’s ‘Writing,’ A Poem the Bard Considered Among...
Two years after the death of beloved Egyptian poet Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi — who passed away on April 21, 2015 — translator, author, and editor Mona Anis brings us a fresh English version of his...
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Sunday Submissions: ‘A Blade of Grass,’ New Palestinian Poetry
Novelist, poet, and academic Naomi Foyle is putting together a bilingual anthology of Palestinian poetry for Smokestack Books, and she’s looking for your submissions: By Belal Khaled. The dual-language...
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A New Translation from Amal Dunqul’s ‘Book of Genesis’
When asked back in 2009 what Arabic works should be translated into English, poet-translator Fady Joudah told the Quarterly Conversation he’d like to see Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird It Follows...
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Friday Finds: Ahmed Shafie, ‘I Did Not Find Poetry Where I Left It’
Robin Moger has translated several poems, as well as a novel excerpt, by Ahmed Shafie; the latest for the Spring 2017 issue of Seedings magazine: Shafie is an Egyptian poet, novelist, and translator,...
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Three Poets You Should Know: Noor Naga, Mona Kareem, Iman Mersal
Last Friday, Iman Mersal and Mona Kareem spoke in New York City as part of Makhzin’s residency, a talk that has now appeared on SoundCloud. And on Tuesday, Noor Naga won the 2017 RBC Bronwen Wallace...
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Friday Finds: Newly Translated Poems by Ahmed Shafie, Wadie Saadeh, and...
Over at Qisas Ukhra, translator Robin Moger has published several new poems: First, he bought out two newly translated poems by the late Syrian poet and playwright Muhammad al-Maghout (1934-2006)....
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Zeina Hashem Beck: ‘Careful Not To Use Others’ Suffering in a Poem’
Over at Qantara, there is an interview with Dubai-based Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck. Or, if you prefer a podcast, you can listen to Hashem Beck talk about her most recent collections with David...
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Tamim Barghouti and Translating Popular Arabic Poetry into English
Tamim Al-Barghouti told Amina Howeidi, for a piece published in 2005, that translating one of his poems into English tends to strip it of meaning. From Howeidi: A poem in Arabic, his “most efficient”...
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Friday Finds: The Poetry of Underappreciated Saniyah Saleh
The work of Saniyah Saleh was underappreciated in her lifetime, but has undergone — or is undergoing — a small renaissance, as it appears in a recent book on motherhood by the great Egyptian poet Iman...
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7 Arabic Poetry Books Forthcoming in Translation: From Adonis to Zaqtan
There seems to have an general uptick in Arabic poetry forthcoming in English translation. These are the six (correction, SEVEN) on ArabLit’s radar: July 2017 The Silence That Remains, by Ghassan...
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