Editor’s note: The poems in Ghassan Zaqtan’s Strangers in Light Coats, translated by Robin Moger and published by Seagull Books this month, are come from four of Zaqtan’s collections, published in 2014, 2015, 2019, and 2021. The final collection also titled Strangers in Light Coats (“غرباء بمعاطف خفيفة“). Together, the poems selected from these four books build a folkloric landscape that is the author’s own. There are woodsmen and kings and djinn and collections of sevens; there are women who speak to wells and men who die of love; but there is also a war in Beirut, snipers, and rain falling on a conversation between Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.
There is an incantatory storyteller’s lilt to many of the poems, rendered by Moger with a light touch, as in “The river hymn,” where the poetic voice calls: “River, river, / soften your breeze / as the daughters wade the fords into the twin darknesses / of temptation and patience; /be still as the muezzin’s daughter crosses at the ford, be / as a carpet laid out for her by the birds /as she steps down, out of his voice, / into the prayers and the dawn.”
In the poem below, “By force of habit,” a sing-song rhythm — which seems to echo out of the depths of childhood — is paired with a dark recognition of the persistence of war, leaving the reader in an unsettled present.
By force of habit
By Ghassan Zaqtan
Translated by Robin Moger
The soldier that the squad left in the garden,
the squad that the border guards left at the checkpoint,
the checkpoint that the occupation left at the crossing,
the occupation that the politician left in our lives,
the politician who was a soldier in the occupation,
the Merkava that the army left at the school,
the army that the war left in the city,
the war which the general left in the bedroom,
the general whom the peace left in our sleep,
the peace that was driving the Merkava,
still snipe at our heads without orders,
just so,
by force of habit.
Born near Bethlehem, Palestinian poet, novelist and editor Ghassan Zaqtan has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, a novel and a play, The Narrow Sea, which was honoured at the 1994 Cairo Festival. His verse collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize for 2013, and he was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in both 2014 and 2016. His name appeared for the first time in 2013 among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English based in Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Tentacular, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Seedings, The Johannesburg Review of Books, The Washington Square Review and others. He has translated several novels and prose works into English, most recently Haytham El Wardany’s The Book Of Sleep (Seagull Press) and Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping (Two Lines Press).
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