During long-distance telecommunication with Mosab Abu Toha, a friend and poet in Gaza, we discussed translating writers from Gaza. This became more urgent during the pandemic, since Gaza was already living through years of lockdowns, to the point of suffocation. Having worked on a collaborative translation, Syrian poet and former political prisoner Faraj Bayrakdar’s extraordinary collection A Dove in Free Flight (UpSet Press, 2021), forming a group made sense and, with Addison Bale, Khaled al-Hilly, Elsa Saade, and Emna Zghal, it came together. Mosab sent us selections. We were struck by the dramatic surrealist/absurdist power of Nasser Rabah and so the translation process began. As Addison Bale writes: "To adapt Nasser Rabah's 'In the Endless War' from Arabic into English, we each looked for ways to address the gaps that naturally form where one language has no shelter for certain specificities of another. 'In the Endless War,' represents our collective effort to approximate Rabah's rich imagination, evoking not only his artistry but also his survival." Nasser joins us in being thrilled to see this poem get such wide circulation and we plan to continue our work on translating more contemporary work from Gaza.
Ammiel Alcalay on "In the Endless War" |
|
|
What Sparks Poetry:
John Robert Lee on Philip Larkin's "Church Going"
"I took, and still take, however subsumed, his neo-formal poetic forms, unfussy, concentrated, a modest musical tone playing on half rhymes and perhaps above all, the finely detailed and close, film-like observation of the world around him, physical, natural, and emotional. 'Church Going' was one of the poems I copied as I learned from him how to shape such pointed, accurate stanzas." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
