Issue 3 of The Bennington Review has a poem by Ghassan Zaqtan, “Damascus 1986,” translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah:
Zaqtan, of course, is a multi-award-winning Palestinian writer living in Ramallah, the author of ten collections of poetry and two novellas, co-winner of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize (for Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me, along with Joudah)and twice nominated for the Neustadt Prize. The Silence That Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), also translated by Joudah, is his most recent poetry collection to appear in English.
His novella, Describing the Past, translated by Samuel Wilder (2016), is a must-read; his Where the Bird Disappeared (2018) builds on that book.
This poem, “Damascus 1986,” is full of hard sounds, scarcely tethered images, and missed opportunities. It opens:
DAMASCUS 1986
The key’s clang
the sun I called from the windowsill
the brief time of fondness
none of it were mine
Read the poem at The Bennington Review.
Reblogged this on Shereen Malherbe and commented:
This piece is from ArabLit one of my favourite blogs & one worth signing up to.
The headline inverted the last two digits. !986, not 1968. Ah, ask me about typos.
That’s the email, the headline above is OK. Sorry about that. No way for me to correct the 35K emails, unfortunately. :-/