Over at Youssef Rakha’s Cosmopolitan Hotel, there are six poems in Robin Moger’s translation, by Moroccan writer Sukaina Habiballah, who is a writer hardly ever whispered about in English:
Author of both poetry and prose, Habiballah was a recipient of Arab Fund for Arts an Culture and al-Mawred al-Thaqafy grants, as well as winner of several awards for poets, including the Buland al-Haidari prize for young poets. Among her poetry collections are A Quarter Century of Sight (2014) and There’s No Need for You (2015).
One of the poems, tr. Robin Moger:
Familiar wounds
Everything in you grew, but not your hand.
Whenever they pushed your way a finger,
A dry stick or a blade,
Incautious, undiscerning
As a babe’s,
Your rude fist wrapped it round
And clung.
Read all six over at the Cosmopolitan Hotel.
More of Habiballah’s work in Arabic, including a chapter from her 2016 novel House of Straw, can be found at el-Mawja. As Moger points out below, Kareem James Abu-Zeid also translated one of Habiballah’s poems for WWB: “Anatomy of the Rose.“
Karim Abu-Zeid translated a poem of hers for WWB a couple of years back:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/march-2016-anatomy-of-the-rose-soukaina-habiballah-kareem-james-abu-zeid
Ah, you’re right, I don’t know how I forgot that.