Friday Finds: Najwan Darwish, ‘An Afternoon in Albaicín’

mlynxqualey

6 years ago

This summer, Poetry Translation Centre will be publishing a new PEN Translates-winning collection by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, titled Embrace, translated by Paul Batchelor and Atef Alshaer:

While you wait, you can read a new poem by Darwish translated by his long-time collaborator Kareem James Abu-Zeid, who translated Darwish’s acclaimed 2014 collection, Nothing More to Lose.

“An Afternoon in Albaicín” opens:

The news of your death reached me
one sweltering afternoon
as I sat with friends on a peak of Albaicín.
They said, “your death.”
I said, “your life.”

You can read it all in Issue Five of New Poetry in Translation, where you can also read an excerpt from Quebecois-Algerian poet Ouanessa Younsi’s Bird-Borrowings, translated by Katelyn Cross.

It opens:

My parents peeled my skin like a fig. I was, each day, a different fruit.

Read:

Younsi’s From Bird Borrowings

Darwish’s “An Afternoon in Albaicín“

And 10 more by Darwish:

1. Want Ad

2. Mary

3. A Moment of Silence

4. We Never Stop

5. If You Only Knew

6. Take This Waltz