Friday Finds: ‘Restoring a Dissolved Person’

Wadih Sa’adeh’s “Restoring a Dissolved Person” recently appeared, in Mahmoud Hosny’s translation, in the Los Angeles Review:

The poem came from the collection Muhawalat Wasl Diffatayni Bi-sawt (Attempt to Connect Two Shores with Sound, 1997).

As Huda Fakhreddine wrote, in Jacket2, about the Lebanese poet:

The writers and artists of Beirut’s Hamra street remember a day in 1973 when a young man from the northern village of Shabtin stood handing out his poetry to passersby. It was Wadiʿ Saʿada (b. 1948) with a stack of handwritten copies of his first poetry collection, The Evening has no Brothers. Stepping outside the established avenues for “making it” in the world of writing and publishing, Saʿada placed himself and his writing out in the open, literally on the side of the street. He went out to meet the abstract reader, in person. 

The poem opens:

This lake is not water. It was a person I had talked to for a long time then he dissolved. 

And now I am not trying to look at the water but to restore a dissolved person.

How could people become lakes floated by leaves and algae like that?! 

Keep reading at the Los Angeles Review.

More:

Three poems by Sa’adeh translated by Huda Fakhreddine

Three poems by Sa’adeh translated by Robin Moger

Fourteen poems of Sa’adeh’s translated by Ghada Mourad